Last month, the City of Alameda blocked scientists from continuing basic research into an experimental approach that may, one day, slow global warming.
The research was being done by atmospheric scientists from the University of Washington, and a nonprofit called SilverLining. SilverLining is funded by a consortium of philanthropic foundations and individual donors. Despite the researchers' credentials, the city council remained skeptical and voted unanimously to halt the work.
"We need to know more about this before you come to our city and start these experiments," concluded Alameda Mayor Marilyn Ezzy Ashcraft.
Marine cloud brightening is a scalable potentially majorly helpful mitigation strategy to keep us from going completely off the tipping points rails and this dip shit city council said you can't do research because you haven't done enough research
The comparison I most often see is that marine cloud brightening could potentially offset the loss of the aerosol masking effect from sea shipping companies cutting sulfur from their fuels. The aerosol masking effect is estimated to be somewhere between 0.5–1⁰ C which is now being realized. So Marine cloud brightening could, potentially at an astronomical scale, could offset that. Or we could put sulfur back in the fuels I guess lol
and then keep ramping it up so that we can continue burning fossil fuels until we're masking 2-3 c in warming and then there's an economic slowdown and we can't keep up the geoengineering and suddenly it's mask off on however many extra decades of warming got baked in meanwhile
the research is good, but geoengineering initiatives under capitalism are a death sentence