The project has several private donors, including billionaire Bill Gates.
The billionaire creator of Windows, Bill Gates, is one of the people who is supporting a project to cool the Earth a little.
The initiative is called SCoPEx and has been created by experts from Harvard University, who will send a large balloon 19 kilometers high and then from it, 2 kg of calcium carbonate will be thrown. Although they say that “other materials such as sulfates could also be used in response to the evolution of scientific interests.”
The objective will be for this dust to deflect part of the solar radiation and thus prevent it from hitting the surface of the planet with force, which would help it not get so hot.
The first test will be carried out on the city of Kiruna, northern Sweden, according to a publication of the British newspaper Daily Mail. This mission would cost three million dollars, which has been raised with private donors, including Gates.
This first test will serve to analyze how the particles react and the results that could be obtained if it is carried out on a larger scale.
The director of the project, Frank Keutsch, told The Times newspaper that they are looking to see if the reality is similar or not to the favorable results obtained in models developed in computers with respect to the possible results.
Keutsch has shown ‘terror’ of the need to use this geoengineering scale and believes that this would only be used in extreme cases where a place can be rendered uninhabitable by a considerable rise in temperature due to global warming. Therefore, he says that the necessary measures must be taken to stop the contamination.
The idea would be to imitate a bit what happens when there is a volcanic eruption.
Along the same lines, critics of the project see in it a possible excuse for politicians not to take these measures. One of them is Stuart Haszeldine, a professor at the University of Edinburgh, who claims that this would not help treat the cause of the warming.
It’s like taking heroin: you have to keep using the drug to keep having the effect, ”Haszeldine told The Times.
Meanwhile, a professor at the University of Cambridge, David King, pointed out in the same medium that you have to be careful with this technique because it is not known what impact it could have on meteorological systems.
