U.K. Funds Geoengineering Experiments as Global Controversy Grows
CLIMATEWIRE | As temperatures fall and sunlight wanes this winter, scientists will gather in the Canadian Arctic with drills and pumps in tow. Their mission: to refreeze the region's melting sea ice.
Known as Re-Thickening Arctic Sea Ice, or RASi, the project aims to pump seawater from the ocean and spray it over the top of existing ice floes, where the cold air will freeze it solid. Researchers hope that the process will create a thicker layer of sea ice, helping undo some of the damage caused by rising global temperatures.
For now, it's just an experiment — and a relatively small one at that. Over the next three winter seasons, the researchers plan to refreeze areas as large as 1 square kilometer, or 0.38 square miles. Along the way, they'll assess how the project affects the local ecology and the movement of the sea ice — and how long it takes to melt again in the summer.
On supporting science journalism
If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.
The project is one of a handful of geoengineering experiments funded by the British government. UK's Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA) announced on Wednesday that it would invest a total of about $60 million in climate-cooling research, spread among 21 projects.
ARIA was established in 2023 to support a variety of research fields, from artificial intelligence to genetic engineering, but its investment in geoengineering studies counts as among its most controversial projects. The discourse has only grown more polarized as new research pushes once-futuristic techno-solutions into the realm of possibility.
Research advocates argue that the world is not reducing greenhouse gases fast enough to meet the Paris Agreement's global climate goals. Cutting carbon emissions is still the most important way to address climate change — but as the planet heats up, they argue, scientists should understand the potential pros and cons of climate-cooling technology.
But critics worry that too much emphasis on geoengineering could distract world leaders from their efforts to phase out fossil fuels and reduce emissions.
Meanwhile, other recent geoengineering experiments have ended amid public criticism, including Harvard University's SCoPEX experiment, a University of Washington cloud-brightening experiment and a sea ice-refreezing project conducted by an organization known as the Arctic Ice Project. An unauthorized experiment in 2022 by the startup Make Sunsets in Baja California, Mexico, resulted in a solar geoengineering ban from the Mexican government.
Meanwhile, the world's largest geoengineering conference — the Degrees Global Forum — is set to begin in Cape Town, South Africa, next week.
Most of ARIA's new projects involve computer modeling, climate monitoring or social questions related to governance and ethics surrounding geoengineering. Only five projects call for real-life outdoor experiments — but they're easily the most expensive of all the research categories, totaling about $32 million in awarded funds. RASi received the most funding of all projects, at $13 million over the next 42 months.
Other experiments on the list include three projects aimed at brightening clouds to reflect more sunlight away from the Earth. A fifth experiment focuses on stratospheric aerosol injection, a strategy that would spray reflective particles into the atmosphere to directly beam sunlight back into space. The project would load up various kinds of mineral dust into weather balloons to test how they interact with the air at high altitudes without directly releasing them into the sky.
All outdoor experiments will undergo legal and environmental assessments in advance, said Mark Symes, an ARIA program director, in an email. And none of them will release toxic materials or deliberately set out to cool the climate, he said.
The announcement garnered both concern and support from organizations involved in global conversations around geoengineering.
'The UK Government risks triggering a costly, dangerous, and distracting race to develop technologies that should never be used,' said Mary Church, a geoengineering campaign manager with the nonprofit Center for International Environmental Law, in a statement. 'Even experimenting with these technologies could further destabilise an already tense geopolitical context.'
The country should instead focus on phasing out fossil fuels, she added, suggesting that even small-scale experiments could become a 'slippery slope' on the way to larger geoengineering deployments.
But Kelly Wanser, executive director of the nonprofit SilverLining, said in a statement that she was 'heartened to see our friends at ARIA and the government in the UK recognize the need for responsible scientific research on potential interventions in the Earth system.' SilverLining advocates for geoengineering research.
Symes emphasized that cutting carbon emissions should remain the world's priority when it comes to addressing climate change. Still, he added, more research is 'essential' for informed global decision-making around potential climate interventions.
'ARIA's programme is focused on generating fundamental scientific evidence about whether any proposed climate cooling approaches could ever be safe or feasible — or whether they should be ruled out entirely,' he said in an email.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Boston Globe
13 hours ago
- Boston Globe
Their children have a rare condition. They didn't know its name – until now.
The adults standing by waited to see what the two would do next. To someone watching from the outside, the interactions of five children in a D.C. park on a warm weekend afternoon would not have seemed extraordinary. But to those children's parents, every move offered insights - into what they could do now, into what they might be able to do someday. Advertisement The families recently learned they share a profound connection. They had each watched their children fail to hit the milestones others did with seeming ease. They were late to crawl and walk. Some have trouble eating and don't speak. A few have seizures. 'Global developmental delays,' the doctors call it when such lags in language, motor skills and cognition happen at the same time. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up Doctors couldn't tell them why their children were experiencing what they were experiencing, and with no diagnosis, they had no clear prognosis for their kids, or themselves. It was an excruciating mystery that hummed through years of specialist visits and brain scans that yielded no clear answers. Until last year. Thanks to a global partnership among genetics researchers and the relentless organizing of parents, the five D.C.-area families who gathered in the park - and many more who aren't yet aware of the breakthrough - now have a name for their children's condition. The rare genetic anomaly that causes it was discovered just last year, and families that once felt alone with their questions are now finding answers and one another. Advertisement Eleanor clapped when she saw the flower that day. But instead of taking hold of it, she let more than a minute pass, seeming unable to grasp it. Three-year-old Rae lay beside the two, warming herself in the sun. Her mom, Leila Levi, marveled at seeing the children together. 'You just hope,' she said, 'that the world is kind to them.' Eleanor Liu, 3, played in a D.C. park in April. Shedrick Pelt/For The Washington Post The discovery A little over a year before, a leading expert on rare diseases at the University of Oxford, Nicky Whiffin, was looking at the data in front of her and thought there was a mistake. One of her students, Yuyang Chen, had been searching through a vast British database, known as the 100,000 Genomes Project, as part of her team's effort to ferret out answers for people with undiagnosed conditions. For years, Whiffin's strategy had been to scour the less-studied regions of the genome. Out of nearly 9,000 patients with unexplained brain development disorders, Chen found that 46 of them had an identical change in their DNA, a single added letter in their 6-billion-part genetic code. 'That looks to me like it's an error in the data,' Whiffin told him. In the world of rare conditions, that was a stunningly high number of cases. Something must be wrong with the sequencing technology or their analysis tools, she thought. So they set about trying to knock down their discovery. Advertisement 'And we just couldn't disprove it,' Whiffin said. She reached out to collaborators around the world looking for confirmation, including a scientist in Boston who is part of the GREGoR Consortium, a national network of researchers working to diagnose rare disease cases. That scientist, Anne O'Donnell-Luria, sent a request to a geneticist at Children's National Hospital in D.C. for more information about patients with the same genetic change, or similar ones in nearly the same place. Seth Berger, a medical geneticist at Children's National, looked at about 300 patients. A big part of his job is helping to discover new diseases. He had never seen anything like this. 'Typically when we find a new syndrome, I'll find one in this region. And then we'll find one in like Texas, and one in Florida, and maybe a couple in Europe somewhere. And you maybe find five people around the world,' Berger said. A genetic condition known as ReNU syndrome was discovered last year, bringing answers to five D.C.-area families. Shedrick Pelt/For The Washington Post Four families were found in the Washington area alone. Whiffin published an early version of the findings in April 2024, and a final version in the journal Nature that July. The math was astounding - the implications for families even more so. She estimates that 0.4 percent of babies born with severe neurodevelopmental disorders have this newly identified genetic condition. 'Huge,' Berger said of the discovery. 'Kind of madness,' Whiffin said. It's called ReNU syndrome, a nod to the gene at issue, RNU4-2. By Whiffin's calculations, 100,000 people around the globe are living with it. Life without answers When Kathy Yang got the call last year from Children's National finally putting a name and scientific explanation to what was happening with her daughter Eleanor, she began to cry. Advertisement From the moment Eleanor was born, Yang knew something was different. The doctors told her she had nothing to worry about. But she had two other kids, and deep down, she knew. Within months, doctors confirmed what she sensed. Eleanor was diagnosed with hypotonia, which is also called 'floppy infant syndrome' and is characterized by low muscle tone. She had microcephaly, meaning her head was smaller than was typical of children her age. Yang went into an Instagram spiral, trying to understand her daughter through photos of others with disabilities. 'Is that Eleanor? Is that Eleanor?' she wondered. During evenings left alone with her thoughts, she feared it was her fault. 'I was in my head, like, 'Is it because I ate something wrong? Is it because I had that one sip of wine?' So it haunts you,' Yang said. What was facing Eleanor was not caused by, or inherited from, her parents. ReNU stems from what scientists call 'de novo' genetic variants, or changes that are 'newly arisen in the child,' Whiffin said. When Yang finally learned the cause of her daughter's condition, she cried. 'I could take away some of the guilt,' she recalled. There was much she didn't know about raising a child with a developmental disability, and there are many questions that remain, like what will Eleanor's life be as an adult? But, she said, she knows this: 'She's a joy to have in our family.' Eleanor's dad, Henry Liu, was struck watching his daughter with the other children affected by ReNU. 'They're all like twins,' he said. 'They're very good-natured. They're happy kids.' Susannah Rosenblatt played with her 5-year-old son, Sam, and his older brother, Charlie. Shedrick Pelt/For The Washington Post For eight years, Lindsay Pearse and her husband, Grant, who live in Warrenton, Virginia, tried to figure out what was happening with their son, Lars. They were in and out of the hospital, seeing specialist after specialist. They addressed Lars's 'global delays' with physical and speech therapy, a feeding tube and leg braces. But they, like the others, had not been able to dig out the cause of their child's challenges. They thought they might never know. Advertisement Then they got a call early last year. Lars - like Adeline, Eleanor and Rae - had been enrolled in a research project with Berger at Children's National. Their DNA had provided vital pieces of evidence in Whiffin's global study. For families, it's been like they've somehow been given access to a time machine. Beyond the kinship and camaraderie of finding families who have gone through what they have, they now have a view into the opportunities and dangers coming years or decades down the line. Lars had his first seizure when he was 2. They were sporadic at first, but in the last year they've ramped up, which had worried his parents. Now, the family is part of a community that includes parents of teenagers and young adults with ReNU syndrome who saw the same pattern in their kids and shared their experiences. From them, the family also learned that weak bones could emerge as a problem, better preparing them to try to address it. The rush of practical information has pared back a sense of helplessness - and injected new energy and hope for many. Pearse has used the fear and frustration of her family's experience to fuel efforts to organize, helping found a patient advocacy group last fall, ReNU Syndrome United. The group, at its first conference in July, is developing a global road map, ranging from fundraising to coordination with researchers and companies, for finding therapeutics that could help people with ReNU. Advertisement 'What we've learned from the scientific community is it's very targetable,' Pearse said, adding that their sights are on a 'bullish' five-year timeline to try to find treatments. Many questions remain about what parts of the condition might be preventable or reversible. For example, a gene therapy breakthrough might address Lars's troubles expressing himself through language, which she finds heartbreaking. That would be a relief as a parent, she said, and yet, 'I also very much personally believe that Lars is perfect as he is.' Whiffin said with new genetic therapies, including tools to edit DNA and target crucial proteins, ReNU could end up being 'one of the fastest discoveries of a disorder to getting a treatment.' But there are many caveats, leaving her with 'tempered hope.' Researchers must learn more about the basic biology of ReNU, which affects a complex process within cells called splicing, to know if a therapy will be safe and effective, Whiffin said. Since ReNU is a disorder of development, a child might need treatment very early on to make a difference, she said. Yet sometimes that's not needed. ReNU is drawing crucial interest from drug companies, as well as other researchers, she said, because so many people are affected. Turns out, their island wasn't deserted after all, Pearse said. Vast numbers of families are still out there. 'We'd love to find them,' she said. Finding one another Four of the families had met before the recent park gathering. They called themselves Team Real - for Rae, Eleanor, Addie and Lars. A fifth Washington-area child, Sam, joined them for the first time that Sunday. His family just learned his diagnosis in April, thanks to a network of eagle-eyed moms - including Rae's - and a rapid-fire series of connections. 'Our sweet girl was diagnosed with a newly discovered genetic mutation last year,' Rae's mother, Leila Levi, of Bethesda, Maryland, wrote in a Facebook post on April 3. She's normally guarded about exposing her family's business on social media but wanted to share information about ReNU and a fundraising page for the D.C. families. Levi's law school classmate saw the post, thought the symptoms sounded familiar and told her friend, Sam's mom, Susannah Rosenblatt, who contacted Berger. He asked for Sam's raw data from previous genetic testing and easily pinpointed the added letter that Whiffin's team had identified. When Sam, 5, rolled up to the park in jeans and a blue fleece, Adeline took an interest. She's social, which her parents credit partly to her twin brother Oliver, who has pushed her from the start. At school, she tries to take care of other kids, and is particularly drawn to those with special needs. At home, she sets out lunch boxes for her dolls, mothering them. She'd never met Sam before. That day, she reached for a colorful pop-it toy he was holding. Then she tried to borrow a tablet Sam uses to communicate, since he makes sounds and gestures but does not speak. 'Addie, see that's his,' her mom said. 'Does she like your toy? So you need to hug mommy about it?' his mom said. 'He's really good with the talker,' Eleanor's mom said. 'That's amazing.' He had pushed a button generating the message: 'My name is Sam.' The gathering sometimes appeared too much for Sam, who as his mom held him, began tugging at her hair, a coping mechanism she hopes to help him grow out of - and a scene familiar to some of the other parents there. That's something Lars does too sometimes, when he can't communicate what he wants or needs, his mother explained. 'Nobody was bothered,' Rosenblatt said later, describing her relief. 'There was no awkwardness or judgment if your child's acting in an unexpected way, because they can totally understand and relate.'
CNBC
2 days ago
- CNBC
Harvard-trained educator: Kids who learn how to use AI will become smarter adults—if they avoid this No. 1 mistake
Students that copy and paste ChatGPT answers into their assignments, with little thinking involved, are doing themselves a disservice — especially because artificial intelligence really can help students become better learners, according to psychologist and author Angela Duckworth. Instead of distrusting AI, show kids how to properly use it, Duckworth advised in a speech at the University of Pennsylvania's Graduate School of Education commencement ceremony on May 17. Teachers and parents alike can show them how to use the technology's full potential by asking AI models follow-up questions, so they can learn — in detail — how chatbots came to their conclusions, she said. "AI isn't always a crutch, it can also be a coach," said Duckworth, who studied neurobiology at Harvard University and now teaches psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. "In my view, [ChatGPT] has a hidden pedagogical superpower. It can teach by example." Duckworth was skeptical about AI until she found herself stumped by a statistics concept, and in the interest of saving time, asked ChatGPT for help, she said. The chatbot gave her a definition of the concept, a couple of examples and some common misuses. Wanting clarification, she asked follow-up questions and for a demonstration, she said. After 10 minutes of using the technology, she walked away with a clear understanding of the Benjamini-Hochberg procedure, "a pretty sophisticated statistical procedure," she said. "AI helped me reach a level of understanding that far exceed what I could achieve on my own," said most advanced generative AI models suffer from hallucinations and factual inaccuracies, data shows — meaning you should always double check its factual claims, and teach kids to do the same. The topic of "how to use AI" should even find its way into school curricula, billionaire entrepreneur and investor Mark Cuban similarly suggested in a New York magazine interview, which published on Tuesday. "The challenge isn't that kids are using it. The challenge is that schools haven't adapted to the that it's available and kids are literate in using it," Cuban said, adding that simply knowing what questions to ask AI is a valuable skillset. Since AI tools do make mistakes, you can likely benefit most directly by using them for tasks that don't involve your final product, side hustle expert Kathy Kristof told CNBC Make It in February. You might, for example, ask a chatbot to create a bullet-point outline for your next writing project — rather than asking it to write the final draft for you. "While I still see AI making a lot of mistakes, picking up errors or outdated information, using AI to create a first draft of something that's then reviewed and edited by human intelligence seems like a no-brainer," said Kristof, founder of the blog. A recent study, conducted by one of Duckworth's doctorate students, followed participants — some of whom were allowed to use chatbots — as they practiced writing cover letters. When later asked to write a cover letter without any assistance, the group that had used AI produced stronger letters on their own, the research shows. The study, published in January, has not yet been peer-reviewed. "Over and over, I watched [ChatGPT] shorten sentences that were too long, weed out needless repetition and even reorder ideas so they flowed more logically," Duckworth said, referencing the research. ,
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Yahoo
Rare predator set to make history after international journey: 'I had a few tears in my eyes'
A British-born lynx is on the precipice of making history hundreds of miles away from its original home at the Newquay Zoo. The BBC reported on the unusual saga of the female lynx, whom conservationists hope can survive and thrive in Germany's Black Forest. Last year, there was a shortage of female lynx births in Central Europe, according to Dina Gebhardt, the lynx-breeding coordinator for the European Endangered Species Programme. Thus, Gebhardt made the unorthodox request to the Cornwall zoo to see if it would send over a one-year-old female. "Of course, we said yes straight away; that's something that we'd love to do," the zoo's curator of plants and animals, John Meek, told the BBC. The lynx was transported via truck to its new temporary home, a 1,200-square-meter (3,937-square-foot) enclosure. The animal wandered out carefully into its new surroundings, which prompted an emotional response from Meek. "I'm a big boy, but I had a few tears in my eyes," he said. If all goes well, the lynx will be able to regain its fear of humans and show off hunting and survival skills over the next few months. From there, it would be reintroduced to the wild, making it the first United Kingdom zoo-born cat to achieve that feat. It would represent another conservation win for the lynx in Europe that would join a resurgence in the animal in Iberia. Sightings of North American lynxes have amazed onlookers and heartened conservationists. No matter where they are spotted, a key concern for conservationists is that interaction with humans is minimized and they are given proper room to roam. Lynx play an important role as a predator in the Central European ecosystem by controlling the deer population and preserving forests, according to lynx reintroduction chief Eva Klebelsberg. "Our ecosystems in Europe are missing large predators," Klebelsberg explained to the BBC. Do you think we still have a lot to learn from ancient cultures? Definitely Only on certain topics I'm not sure No — not really Click your choice to see results and speak your mind. This female lynx could help play a small but important role in fulfilling a need. The team in charge of the animal has little concern about its ability to hunt. The real challenge figures to be the lynx's familiarity with keepers who feed it, and zoo visitors who ogle it. No matter how it goes, Meek will be watching from the UK. "Nowadays, zoos are not here to keep animals in cages," he said. "They're there for conservation." Join our free newsletter for good news and useful tips, and don't miss this cool list of easy ways to help yourself while helping the planet.
