{"id":3423,"date":"2026-07-08T18:40:52","date_gmt":"2026-07-08T18:40:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/silvybrand.com\/?p=3423"},"modified":"2026-07-08T18:40:52","modified_gmt":"2026-07-08T18:40:52","slug":"dimming-the-sun-would-lower-risks-of-el-nino","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/silvybrand.com\/?p=3423","title":{"rendered":"Dimming the Sun Would Help Lower the Risks of El Ni\u00f1o"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><br \/>\n<\/p>\n<div>\n<p><span class=\"lead-in-text-callout\">This year\u2019s El<\/span> Ni\u00f1o is shaping up to be among the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.wired.com\/story\/super-el-nino-turns-worlds-weather-upside-down\/\" class=\"text link\">strongest on record<\/a>, and it\u2019s set to create chaotic weather around the world.<\/p>\n<p class=\"paywall\">A new study suggests that there could be a way to mitigate some of the impacts of future El Ni\u00f1os and global warming: dimming the sun.<\/p>\n<p class=\"paywall\">El Ni\u00f1o develops naturally in the tropical Pacific every few years, caused by weakened trade winds that push heat from the ocean toward the coast of South America. This tilts the odds toward higher-than-average global temperatures, as well as droughts in some regions, intense rains and floods in others, and more cyclones in the Pacific. Piled on top of warming driven by burning fossil fuels, a strong El Ni\u00f1o can mean hundreds of billions in economic losses.<\/p>\n<p class=\"paywall\">The new study argues that deflecting solar energy could cool the ocean and help moderate El Ni\u00f1o events before they become too strong, staving off the worst impacts.<\/p>\n<p class=\"paywall\">\u201cEl Ni\u00f1o is one of these things where something happens in the tropical Pacific, and then it rearranges the way the entire global atmosphere is holding energy that year,\u201d says Katherine Ricke, a coauthor of the study published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances and a climate scientist at UC San Diego and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. \u201cIt\u2019s an ultimate pressure point in the climate system.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"paywall\">Ricke and her coauthors looked at using marine cloud brightening, or MCB, as a way to dim the sun in the Pacific. The technique entails spraying seawater into marine clouds to enhance the clouds\u2019 reflectivity. While some pilot projects and randomized controlled trials have tested the technique\u2019s efficacy, they\u2019ve only been on very small scales.<\/p>\n<p class=\"paywall\">MCB is one of a few different <a href=\"https:\/\/www.epa.gov\/geoengineering\/about-geoengineering\" class=\"text link\">solar geoengineering methods<\/a> intended to reflect sunlight back into space. Other methods, like using planes to inject <a href=\"https:\/\/www.wired.com\/story\/think-climate-change-is-messy-wait-until-geoengineering\/\" class=\"text link\">aerosols into the stratosphere<\/a>, can only work globally. But MCB has the potential to be a regional cooling solution.<\/p>\n<p class=\"paywall\">To get around the lack of MCB experiments, researchers looked at a recent natural phenomenon that mimicked it: the catastrophic 2019-2020 Australian bushfire season. More than 10,000 bushfires raged across the country, producing almost <a href=\"https:\/\/research.noaa.gov\/giant-australian-bushfire-injected-1-million-tons-of-smoke-in-the-atmosphere\/\" class=\"text link\">1 million metric tons of smoke<\/a>. That represents one of the largest inputs of smoke into the stratosphere that humans have observed with satellite technology.<\/p>\n<p class=\"paywall\">While the effects of this massive amount of smoke were complex, previous research shows it helped trigger a rare triple-dip <a href=\"https:\/\/www.wired.com\/story\/a-rare-coincidence-of-la-nina-events-will-weaken-hurricane-season\/\" class=\"text link\">La Ni\u00f1a<\/a>\u2014the opposite phase of El Ni\u00f1o\u2014thanks in part to reflective particles in the smoke.<\/p>\n<p class=\"paywall\">This event, Ricke says, enabled her and her coauthors to finally address a question they\u2019d had for years about whether regional interventions can help relieve the pressure events like El Ni\u00f1o put on the global climate system. The researchers created a model based on the MCB effects of the Australian bushfires, and ran it against two different historic El Ni\u00f1o events to observe its effects. The modeling showed that lowering the amount of sunlight reaching the Pacific\u2019s surface would have significantly reduced the magnitude of those El Ni\u00f1o events and their global impact.<\/p>\n<p class=\"paywall\">Geoengineering techniques have traditionally been viewed as a method to cool the entire planet, acting as a counterbalance to humans\u2019 use of fossil fuels\u2014albeit an extremely controversial one. The new study makes the case that some forms of geoengineering would be better used to target regional events, like El Ni\u00f1o. Doing so has the potential to avoid\u2014or at least lower the risk\u2014of the compounding effects of El Ni\u00f1o piled on top of rising temperatures due to human activity.<\/p>\n<p class=\"paywall\">\u201cThe idea of having to sustain geoengineering indefinitely gives a lot of people pause\u2014we all understand that cooperation at that magnitude would be hugely complicated in the world we live in,\u201d Ricke says. \u201cThis is a totally different way to think about geoengineering.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><br \/>\n<br \/><a href=\"https:\/\/www.wired.com\/story\/dimming-the-sun-would-lower-risks-of-el-nino\/\">Source link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This year\u2019s El Ni\u00f1o is shaping up to be among the strongest on record, and it\u2019s set to create chaotic weather around the world. A new study suggests that there could be a way to mitigate some of the impacts of future El Ni\u00f1os and global warming: dimming the sun. El Ni\u00f1o develops naturally in [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3424,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[426,96,224,49,922],"class_list":["post-3423","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-gadgets","tag-climate","tag-climate-change","tag-el-nino","tag-environment","tag-geoengineering"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v28.0 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Dimming the Sun Would Help Lower the Risks of El Ni\u00f1o - Silvybrand Lifestyle Blog<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"As worries about a growing super El Ni\u00f1o mount, new findings suggest a radical solution to mitigating its impacts.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/silvybrand.com\/?p=3423\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Dimming the Sun Would Help Lower the Risks of El Ni\u00f1o - 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