Latest news with #climatecooling
Telegraph
17-05-2025
- Science
- Telegraph
Dimming the Sun ‘not the way to fight climate change'
Dimming the Sun is not the solution to climate change, the majority of the public has been found to believe. Polling by YouGov revealed that Britons are sceptical about plans to dim the Sun though geoengineering projects, with more than half unwilling to support climate tinkering. The Advanced Research and Invention Agency (Aria), a government body, announced nearly £57 million last week for 21 'climate cooling' projects, including five outdoor field trials. It will include experiments to reflect sunlight back into space by brightening clouds, injecting aerosols into the atmosphere and using computer modelling to determine the feasibility of building a giant sunshade in space. But polling by YouGov has showed that while the majority still believes that the worst impact of climate change can be mitigated by humans, far fewer think geoengineering is the right solution. Just 16 per cent said they would be willing to support stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI), in which particles are released into the atmosphere to mimic the cooling effect of volcanic eruptions. Likewise, only 31 per cent said they would back marine cloud brightening, where sea salt particles are sprayed into clouds to increase their reflectivity, and just 18 per cent approve of research into space sunshades.
Telegraph
08-05-2025
- Politics
- Telegraph
The secretive government unit planning to dim the sun
Plans to block sunlight to fight global warming have inadvertently shone a light on Aria, the Government's opaque research arm. The Advanced Research and Invention Agency was set up in 2021 by Kwasi Kwarteng, the ex-Tory business secretary, and was originally the brainchild of Dominic Cummings, Boris Johnson's former chief aide. Yet few people on the street know what it is, what it does, or how much taxpayer cash is flowing into its well-financed coffers. Sure, it has a shiny website stocked with techno-waffle promising to help scientists 'reach for the edge of the possible' and foster 'opportunity spaces' but there has been little clarity on its day-to-day operations. This week, we learnt it will spend £56.8 million on 21 'climate cooling' projects, which include looking into the logistics of building a 'sun shade' in space and injecting plumes of salt water into the sky to reflect sunlight away from Earth. 'We're not trying to dim the sun,' representatives from Aria said rather disingenuously at a press briefing, knowing full well that should experiments prove successful, that is their ultimate aim.
