Can we cool down the Earth by blocking out the sun ?
Scientists have been exploring ambitious new ways to effectively cool, rather than to warm up the planet.
Global warming might seem like an unstoppable, irreversible process that can only be slowed down through a concerted global effort to cut carbon emissions and to stop polluting the atmosphere, but what if there was a way that we could actively put global warming in full reverse ?
For years scientists have been mulling over several geoengineering solutions to climate change, each designed to reverse the damage we are doing to the planet using modern technologies.
Some of these, such as pumping chemicals in to the atmosphere or exploding an enormous bomb to move the Earth further from the sun, can be pretty much discounted out-of-hand.
One idea however does have merit – that of a gigantic umbrella that could be deployed in space to block the sun over parts of the planet and slowly bring down global temperatures.
First devised by engineer James Early in 1989, the first version of this orbiting parasol was to be constructed from glass and built on the moon, while more recent suggestions have included an umbrella made from either a cloud of moon dust or a large array of 55,000 wire-mesh mirrors.
The most recent idea suggests creating an army of tiny robots that could be launched in to space and arranged together to produce a configurable umbrella that could be moved at any time.
Whether any of these plans will ever come to fruition however remains to be seen.
