The world's biggest trial of cooling the planet by altering the atmosphere is being launched. It is crucial that it goes ahead, says Jamais Cascio

Injected particles will reflect sunlight NASA

Few scientists working on ways to geoengineer the atmosphere to cool Earth think it’s anything but a scary idea. Unfortunately, it’s a scary idea that we may soon need to embrace.

Solar radiation management (SRM) attempts to slow the more disastrous aspects of rising global temperatures by adding particles to the upper atmosphere to reflect a small percentage of incoming sunlight, potentially slowing, halting or even reversing warming.

Researchers at Harvard University are about to launch a project to field test the idea and see if it could work for real. It will be …