Details emerge on University of Washington’s secretive sunlight-dimming test
Details have emerged about a highly secretive and ultimately aborted solar geoengineering experiment primarily led by a team of researchers from the University of Washington’s Marine Cloud Brightening Program.
An exclusive report by Politico’s E&E News published Sunday and based on hundreds of documents obtained through public records act requests details how researchers deliberately withheld information from local officials and the public to “avoid scaring them” about their weathering-altering experiment.
Scholars had planned to enhance the reflectivity of clouds over a stretch of the Pacific Ocean larger than Puerto Rico.
The article delves into the ethical implications of solar geoengineering research to reverse global warming by reflecting sunlight to cool the planet, with University of Washington official downplaying “the magnitude of the proposed experiment and its potential to change weather patterns” in a statement to the news outlet.
“Instead, they focused on the program’s goal of showing that the instruments for making clouds could work in a real-world setting. They also pushed back on critics’ assertions that they were operating secretively, noting that team members had previously disclosed the potential for open-ocean testing in scientific papers,” Politico reported.
A Department of Energy spokesperson told Politico it helped fund University of Washington “research on how ambient aerosols affect clouds,” but said the agency hadn’t supported “deliberate field deployment of aerosols into the environment.”
According to documents obtained by Politico, researchers’ strategy was to keep their plans from the public and local officials. University of Washington researchers were joined by SilverLining and SRI International.
One text message stated, “We think it’s safest to get air quality review help and are pursuing that in advance of engaging, but I’d avoid scaring them overly.”
Politico added:
But behind the scenes, they were planning a much larger and potentially riskier study of salt water-spraying equipment that could eventually be used to dim the sun’s rays — a multimillion-dollar project aimed at producing clouds over a stretch of ocean larger than Puerto Rico.
…At such scales, meaningful changes in clouds will be readily detectable from space,” said a 2023 research plan from the university’s Marine Cloud Brightening Program. The massive experiment would have been contingent upon the successful completion of the thwarted pilot test on the carrier deck in Alameda, according to the plan. The records offer no indication of whether the researchers or their billionaire backers have since abandoned the larger project.
The 2024 test was ultimately halted by the Alameda, Calif., city council.
Sarah Doherty, an atmospheric and climate science professor at the university who leads the program, told Politico the Marine Cloud Brightening Program does not “recommend, support or develop plans for the use of marine cloud brightening to alter weather or climate.”
She said it remains focused on researching the technology, not deploying it, and there are no “plans for conducting large-scale studies that would alter weather or climate.”
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