Scientists Warn Against Plans To Artificially Cool Polar Regions

Proposals to artificially cool the world’s polar regions — to stem the impact of global warming — are both expensive, unfeasible and potentially dangerous, according to new scientific research.

The Arctic and Antarctic are warming faster than the rest of the world, which has led some think tanks and entrepreneurs to propose large-scale technological interventions. 

But those ideas — including spraying reflective particles high into the atmosphere to reflect sunlight, erecting sea “curtains” to block warm water from melting glaciers and seeding oceans with nutrients to boost the growth of carbon-absorbing algae — aren’t workable and could irreversibly damage polar regions, according to a paper published Tuesday in the journal “Frontiers in Science.”

“Some of these ideas have been given a disproportionately high amount of visibility compared with their maturity and their feasibility,” said lead author Martin Siegert, a polar scientist and vice president at the University of Exeter.

A group of more than three dozen scientists used a set of six criteria to evaluate some of the most well-publicized ideas to cool polar regions, which also include scattering glass beads to reflect sunlight, spraying seawater to thicken sea ice, and drilling into glaciers to remove subsurface water to slow their slide into the ocean. They found the scale, technological requirements and cost were far beyond current capabilities.

Many of the proposals would be hampered by employing unproven technologies across some of the world’s coldest and most isolated regions. They would also be almost impossible to manage through international agreements, the scientists said, adding that unilateral interventions would foment global tensions.

The European Union has been among those saying that the implications of such interventions should be thoroughly assessed, given the potential knock-on effects on food and water supplies. While still in their infancy, such geoengineering technologies are gaining traction as international efforts to curb emissions falter.

The scientists said media interest in the proposals far outstrips their practicality and distracts from the need to invest in adaptation and decarbonization, which they say could reverse warming trends in a matter of decades. 

“We have a known method to improve our situation that has scientific consensus,” said Sammie Buzzard, a professor at the University of Northumbria and one of the paper’s authors. “We know how to decarbonize, so we should be doing it.”

Proponents of exploring polar cooling, however, say some scientists are too quick to dismiss ideas that feel unnatural and the trajectory of climate threats is too great to make snap judgments about potential fixes.

“This doesn’t mean we should uncritically embrace yet unproven technologies at the first promise of reducing those climate risks,” said Matthias Honegger, senior program director at the Centre for Future Generations and project leader of the EU-funded Co-CREATE project with the research and advisory firm Perspectives. “But it does mean we must examine their potential and limitations seriously.” 

Scientists, who wrote a separate paper published in the same journal, said decades of lobbying has failed to produce significant political or public will for deep decarbonization. In that context, it’s ethically necessary to embrace any research that could slow global warming, they added.

“We want to move talking about this away from it being a taboo and into the mainstream, where it can be assessed in the normal kinds of ways,” said John Moore, a researcher at the University of Lapland, who wrote the paper. “It may well be that all of these ideas won’t work, but the easiest way to debunk them is to actually do some research and find the red flags and the off-ramps.”