Hyderabad: To slow down carbon dioxide from heating up the earth, geo scientists have proposed a new engineering method to manually brighten marine clouds in coastal areas.
In a research by University of Washington, scientists have proposed to replicate the effect that polluting aerosols have on clouds by using the sea water.
The researchers proposed this idea for coastal areas with persistently low hanging marine clouds, which can easily catch the salt from the sea water. In order to take the salt to the clouds, a device that would make the sea water sprinkle up into the sky as micro droplets would be placed in the sea. The research noted that the salt from these microdroplets would act as aerosols and build brighter clouds.
Scientists have a mixed response to this new technique. “The geo engineering has enormous amount of uncertainty as it can alter the rainfall patterns,” said Professor G Bala of Centre of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, IISC Bangalore. The aerosol-filled clouds always have the uncertainty in terms of the amount of rainfalls they would bring to the area. This new proposal comes in chain with an array of other proposals to beat the climate change with the earliest being putting up mirrors in the space to reflect the sunlight.
“It is a dangerous to experiment with the nat-ure by not fully knowing the consequences. Every technology has unintended consequences,” said retired Professor Babu Rao of IICT.
“Modelling studies have shown that once such geoengineering is stopped after the earth cools down, the temperatures would rise again. Thus, a permanent solution would be to reduce greenhouse gas emission,” said Dr Arindham from IISC.
