There is a technique called Marine Cloud Brightening (MCB)which in Italian we could translate as the “clearing of the marine clouds”, with which the human being is thinking of “cure” global warming by artificially modifying the Earth’s atmosphere: a new solar geoengineering study states that this technique, designed to cool the Earth, could however risk putting El Niño to sleep and distorting the climate.
Imagine having a very hot room and deciding to cool it by placing a huge fan pointed towards a corner. The room cools down, of course, but the movement of air makes all the papers on the desk fly away and moves a curtain, which hits a precious vase, causing it to fall to the floor. A very recent study conducted by scientists fromUniversity of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB)shed a disturbing light on one of the most popular solutions of recent years, demonstrating that a popular “trick” for cooling the planet could accidentally disrupt the global weathergoing to break one of the most important climate engines on Earth: the climate cycle El Niño.
The MCB technique of marine cloud clearing and the collapse of El Niñor
The idea behind the MCB technique is simple: humans spray microscopic particles of sea salt into low clouds over the oceans, particularly in the eastern Pacific. The salt acts as a magnet for moisture, creating much denser, whiter, stratocumulus clouds highly reflective. Functioning like giant mirrors of vapor, these clouds send the Sun’s light back into space before it can heat the water, generating a gigantic refreshing shaded area. On paper it’s a brilliant move, but the Earth’s atmosphere is not a linear system: it’s a chaotic fluid where if you touch a string in the East, a symphony (or disaster) is unleashed in the West.
By feeding data into supercomputers to simulate the long-term effects of this “sunshield,” researchers discovered an unexpected and massive side effect. Application of Marine Cloud Brightening in the eastern Pacific would cause a collapse of the ENSO amplitude (the academic oscillation that governs El Niño and La Niña) by ben the 61%. In practice, by artificially cooling that specific portion of the ocean, the air becomes colder and drier, reducing local rainfall. This change alters atmospheric pressure, weakens air circulation and ends up… constantly strengthening winds along the equator. The result? The natural cycle of El Niño, which every few years brings rain and redistributes heat on the planet, would be almost completely asleep.
This doesn’t simply mean having a more stable climate, but altering monsoon rains in Asia, disrupting the hurricane season in America and changing droughts in Africa. However, the study also made a very important comparison, testing another geoengineering technique:injection of aerosols into the stratosphere (i.e. spray reflective particles much higher, globally). Surprisingly, this second option cooled the planet while leaving the El Niño cycle almost completely unchanged. This discovery reminds us of a fundamental lesson: geoengineering cannot be evaluated only on the basis of how much it manages to lower the global thermometer, because two different techniques can obtain the exact same cooling but produce completely opposite regional impacts.
Between science fiction and reality: is solar geoengineering used in Italy?
When we hear about climate manipulation, our thoughts immediately turn to international conspiracies, chemtrails and secret laboratories. In reality, the weather manipulation it is a science born in broad daylight and, in forms infinitely more limited than those hypothesized in the Californian study, has been experimented with for decades. We are not talking about occult plans, but about a well-known physical technique called cloud seeding (cloud seeding). Born in the 1940s, it consists of shooting microscopic particles of silver iodide or dry ice within existing clouds to push them to discharge small grains of water before the energy necessary to transform them into destructive hail. It is exactly the opposite of what is imagined and what the conspiracy claims: these techniques were created with the intention of protecting and saving crops, certainly not to destroy them.
In Italy this technique is part of our recent history: it has been widely experimented in the past by the government in regions such as Puglia (the famous “Rain” project of the 60s/70s), the Sicily and the Sardinia to combat major drought seasons. However, public programs were long suspended and abandonedboth due to the high costs and because the scientific results on their real effectiveness have proven to be too uncertain and difficult to demonstrate. Today in our country only very few private and localized initiatives of individual agricultural consortia survive (for example in some areas of the North) which attempt to use anti-hail systems on the ground to defend valuable vines, but without any state or structured program.
Then there is a huge difference between the cloud seeding local and the new projects of solar geoengineering: the first was just trying to drop the water a few kilometers earlier to save a field, without altering the global climate; the second instead aims to modify the energy and heat balance of the entire planet.
