Less Sunlight Can Help Reduce the Risk of El Niño

El this year Niño is going to be part of the of written strengthand it is designed to create a climate of chaos around the world.

New research suggests that there may be a way to mitigate some of the effects of future El Niños and global warming: reduce solar radiation.

El Niño occurs naturally in the tropical Pacific every few years, due to strong winds that push heat from the ocean to the coast of South America. This contributes to higher than average global temperatures, as well as droughts in some areas, storms and floods in others, and tropical storms in the Pacific. On top of fossil fuel-driven warming, a strong El Niño could mean hundreds of billions in economic damage.

The new study suggests that deflecting solar energy could cool the oceans and help El Niño events before they become too strong, preventing negative impacts.

“El Niño is one of those things that happens in the tropical Pacific, and then it resets how the rest of the world uses energy that year,” said Katherine Ricke, co-author of the study published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances and a climate scientist at UC San Diego and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. “It’s the biggest problem in climate.”

Ricke and his colleagues used marine cloud brightening, or MCB, as a way to moderate the sun in the Pacific. The process involves spraying seawater into sea clouds to obscure the clouds. Although other pilot projects and randomized controlled trials have tested the effectiveness of the method, they have been limited to very small scales.

MCB is one of the exceptions methods of solar geoengineering its purpose is to reflect sunlight back into space. Other methods, such as the use of aircraft for injection aerosols in the stratosphereit can work all over the world. But MCB has the potential to be a district cooling system.

In order to address the lack of MCB testing, researchers looked at a recent scenario that mimics this: Australia’s 2019-2020 fire season. More than 10,000 bushfires broke out across the country, killing approx 1 million tons of smoke. This represents one of the largest atmospheric plumes observed by satellite technology.

Although the results of the daily increase were negative, previous studies show that it helped to introduce triple dipping. The girl—the opposite phase of El Niño—in a way we’re thankful for some sparks in the smoke.

This event, Mr. Ricke says, helped him and his colleagues to finally answer the question that they have had for years whether intervention can help solve problems like El Niño that cause the global climate. The researchers created a model based on the MCB results of the Australian bushfires, and ran it against two different El Niño events to see the results. The model showed that reducing the amount of sunlight reaching the Pacific Ocean would significantly reduce the magnitude of El Niño events and their global impact.

Generally, geoengineering methods are considered as a way to cool the world, which contradicts the way people use fossil fuels, although they are very controversial. The new research suggests that some forms of geoengineering can be successfully used to track regional events, such as El Niño. Doing so could prevent—or reduce the risk of—an El Niño worsening due to human-induced warming.

Ricke said: “The idea of ​​sustaining geoengineering in perpetuity gives many people pause—we all understand that such a commitment can be very difficult in the world we live in. “This is a very different way of thinking about geoengineering.”