It’s not a joke, because a group of scientists is suggesting a strategy to dehydrate the stratosphere to help cool the planet and thus combat the increase in temperatures due to climate change.
This has been announced by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration of the United States, in a strategy that could cool the atmosphere and counteract the harmful effects of the global warming.
The strategy is called “intentional stratospheric dehydration,” which involves seeding the wettest parts of the stratosphere with tiny particles of ice nuclei to encourage the formation of ice that could fall to the ground as hail.
To do this, high-altitude aircraft would have to be used to install these ice particles, in a proposal very similar to the technology we had seen in cloud seeding.
“Targeting only a small fraction of [partículas] of air in the region would be enough to achieve substantial water removal,” they explain.
Specifically, they have identified the cold spot of the western Pacific, as the wettest and coldest point in the stratosphereand where they could carry out their strategy.
“In terms of effectiveness, the Western Pacific Cold Spot is the ideal ‘sweet spot,'” NOAA research physicist Joshua Schwarz said in the statement.
The strategy is far from being a feasible method to combat the climate changebasically because there is still no technology capable of changing the course of global warming.
In fact, the organization itself points out that drying out the stratosphere would help cool the planet “only to a small degree.”