![\"The](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/070926sungeoengineering.png\")
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Ralf Hirschberger\/AFP via Getty <\/p>\n
\t\t\t\tGet your news from a source that\u2019s not owned and controlled by oligarchs. Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily.<\/a><\/p>\n This story was originally published by\u00a0Wired<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0is reproduced here as part of the\u00a0Climate Desk<\/a>\u00a0collaboration.<\/p>\n This year\u2019s El\u00a0Ni\u00f1o is shaping up to be among the\u00a0strongest on record<\/a>, and it\u2019s set to create chaotic weather around the world.<\/p>\n 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 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 \u201cThe thesis seems quite reasonable,\u201d\u2026 but actually executing something like this would be \u201ca political nightmare.\u201d <\/p>\n 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 \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 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 MCB is one of a few different\u00a0solar geoengineering methods<\/a>\u00a0intended to reflect sunlight back into space. Other methods, like using planes to inject\u00a0aerosols into the stratosphere<\/a>, can only work globally. But MCB has the potential to be a regional cooling solution.<\/p>\n 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\u00a01 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