For one, Boulder, U.S. at the University of Colorado. Mark Serez, a climate scientist who directs the National Snow and Ice Data Center, wonders if they will work as intended. “If you put silica structures in the area of fast moving ocean currents, especially frame straight, they will disintegrate quickly,” he says.
The proposal also raises financial questions, such as who will put on the annual bill of 1-5bn (£ 800m to b 4bn) for building, shipping, testing and distributing the silica structures required in the frame straight? That may be a tear-jerking figure, but it alone seems close to the approximately 460bn (60 360bn) that the United States alone raised between 2017 and 2019 in extreme weather and climate disasters, Field notes.
Researchers are exploring the possibility of other geoengineering approaches to save the melting Arctic, but without any problems. One, for example, requires millions of wind-powered devices to pump water from the ice surface to deep water to create thick layers of ice – which is energy-intensive and not very efficient. She and Ceres look at approaches such as stop-gap solutions to climate change, in which they treat only one symptom – silica dust, in the case of temperature – while doing nothing about its root causes. If the field strategy works as intended, “it’s wonderful,” says Bitz, “but I Learn That CO2 emissions will work in the first place. “
The sector agrees that geoengineering is in no way a substitute for reducing carbon emissions. .Latanu, she sees it as an opportunity to diversify the world economy and buy the time needed to prevent the worst effects of climate change. The silica beads, he says, are “I hope we never need” a backup plan.
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