A startup says it’s begun releasing particles into the atmosphere, in an effort to tweak the climate

He says it's morally wrong for us not to be doing this and to do it safely.

Wildly premature

Dedicated experts in the field think such efforts are premature and could have a negative effect on Iseman's expectations.

Janos Pasztor, executive director of the Carnegie Climate Governance Initiative, wrote that the current state of science isn't good enough to accept or implement solargeoengineering. He compared it to Chinese scientist He Jiankui's decision to use CRISPR to edit the DNA of embryos while the scientific community debated the safety and ethics of such a step.

Shuchi Talati, a scholar-in-residence at American University who is forming a nonprofit focused on solargeoengineering governance and justice, says Make Sunset's actions could set back the scientific field.

The company's behavior plays into long-held fears that a rogue actor with no particular knowledge of atmospheric science or the technology could choose to engineer the climate, without any kind of consensus around whether it's ok to do so. It is cheap and easy to do in a crude way.

David Victor, a political scientist at the University of California San Diego, warned of such a scenario more than a decade ago.

A decade ago, an American businessman poured hundreds of tons of iron sulfate into the ocean in an effort to create a plankton bloom that could help salmon populations and reduce carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Critics say it violated international restrictions on iron fertilization, which were in part inspired by a growing number of commercial proposals to sell carbon credits for such work, and argue that it slowed research efforts in field.

Pasztor and others stressed the need to establish broad-based oversight and clear rules to guide responsible research ingeoengineering and help determine whether or not there should be a social license to move forward with experiments or beyond. According to MIT Technology Review, the Biden administration is working on a federal research plan that will guide how scientists proceed with studies ofgeoengineering.