The University of Cambridge is building a radical new center designed to explore potential ways of fighting climate change.
The Center for Climate Repair will explore radical geoengineering schemes designed to directly tackle the effects of climate change.
Among such schemes being considered are the spraying of salt into clouds in order to make them reflect more warming sunlight back into space.
Others imagine the extraction of atmospheric carbon dioxide for use as fuel, or ocean fertilisation to get more of the gas taken up by the seas.
The research lab is being planned in response to fears that our current approaches to minimize the emission of harmful greenhouse gases will not be enough on their own to prevent catastrophic and irreversible changes to the Earth’s climate.
The mandate of the Centre for Climate Repair will be to ‘solve the climate problem’, University of Cambridge climate scientist Emily Shuckburgh told the BBC.
‘It has to be. And we can’t fail on it,’ she added.
When complete, the centre will be the first of its kind in the world to focus exclusively on reducing carbon emissions and testing radical geoengineering concepts that could be used to try and reverse changes to the climate.
Areas for potential investigation include seeding clouds with salt to make them reflect more sunlight away from the Earth and fertilizing the world’s oceans to try and force them to take up more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.