{"id":540361,"date":"2026-07-09T04:02:09","date_gmt":"2026-07-09T04:02:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/540361\/"},"modified":"2026-07-09T04:02:09","modified_gmt":"2026-07-09T04:02:09","slug":"artificial-cloud-brightening-could-tame-el-nino-but-with-risks-study","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/540361\/","title":{"rendered":"Artificial cloud brightening could tame El Nino, but with risks: Study"},"content":{"rendered":"

WASHINGTON \u2013 A brewing \u201cSuper\u201d El Nino cycle is poised to unleash heatwaves, floods and drought worldwide, with the effects amplified by long term human-caused climate change.<\/p>\n

But what if it was possible to interrupt and \u201cswitch off\u201d the Pacific Ocean heating phenomenon as it starts to form?<\/p>\n

That is the premise of a new Science Advances study published on July 8, which uses computer models to show that artificially brightening clouds over the Pacific, when timed right, could neutralise the influential weather pattern and blunt its worst impacts.<\/p>\n

While previous research on so-called geo-engineering has focused on cooling the planet as a whole, the new paper instead proposes more targeted interventions.<\/p>\n

\u201cThese shorter timescales of interventions could be a very powerful way that geoengineering enters this portfolio of responses to climate change,\u201d lead author Jessica Wan, a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Chicago, told AFP.<\/p>\n

Prior research had shown that the \u201cBlack Summer\u201d bushfires that scorched Australia in 2019 and 2020 played a key role in creating a multi-year La Nina, the cool phase of the El Nino-Southern Oscillation cycle.<\/p>\n

As smoke particles entered the clouds, they set off chain reactions that made the clouds brighter, bouncing more of the Sun\u2019s energy back to space.<\/p>\n

Motivated by this \u201cnatural experiment\u201d, Wan and her colleagues wondered whether solar geo-engineering could achieve a similar effect.<\/p>\n

They used a forecasting model to gauge what impact artificial marine cloud brightening over a vast rectangular zone in the equatorial Pacific would have had on the 1997-1998 and 2015-2016 El Nino events.<\/p>\n

This could theoretically be achieved by using ships fitted with nozzles that spray sea salt into the lower atmosphere.<\/p>\n

El Ninos are linked with warming sea surfaces<\/a> in the eastern tropical Pacific, with knock on effects globally including drier conditions and drought in Australia, wetter winters in East Africa and warmer overall global temperatures.<\/p>\n

After running several simulations, they found the intervention worked best when started early \u2013 in June \u2013 and continued through the following February.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe reason people would ever care about this is not temperature in a box in the Pacific, but also how the impacts translate over land,\u201d said Wan.<\/p>\n

Extreme weather events linked to El Nino have caused loss of life and trillions of dollars of economic damage.<\/p>\n

The modelled cloud brightening reversed most of the temperature and precipitation effects. Areas that got warmer under an El Nino were cooler, regions that got wetter became drier and vice versa.<\/p>\n

So, what is the catch?<\/p>\n

Unknown consequences<\/p>\n

For starters, the technology is not ready.<\/p>\n

Teams around the world are developing nozzles to spray sea salt into the sky, but the devices cannot yet shoot nearly enough volume.<\/p>\n

Even if a nozzle is perfected, it would take roughly 2,400 ships to make the required impact.<\/p>\n

Beyond the engineering challenges, there are further risks.<\/p>\n

Not all regions of the world would benefit from reversing El Nino conditions, and the models showed unintended consequences, including warming over Europe and Asia.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe other catch, I would say, is that we didn\u2019t look at long-term impacts,\u201d said Wan, including what would happen if marine cloud brightening was used repeatedly to suppress El Ninos.<\/p>\n

Geo-engineering has many detractors, who argue it creates a moral hazard by giving polluters a free pass to keep emitting if the climate can be artificially cooled.<\/p>\n

Wan disagrees.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re beyond the point now where we could just turn off emissions today and be totally fine. We\u2019re locked into warming already, and so the way that I viewed geoengineering is: How can we reduce the worst of those impacts while we work on a long-term solution?\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think it would be irresponsible to not do the research, given that\u2019s the context we\u2019re in.\u201d AFP<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"WASHINGTON \u2013 A brewing \u201cSuper\u201d El Nino cycle is poised to unleash heatwaves, floods and drought worldwide, with…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":540362,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[61,60,82],"class_list":["post-540361","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/540361","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=540361"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/540361\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/540362"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=540361"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=540361"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=540361"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}