Could A Sunshade Help Climate Change?

With the ongoing climate crisis and the speed with which it is hitting us, more and more researchers and entrepreneurs are looking for solutions outside of the box. Experts warn that these ideas are very dangerous, that the governments do not fully know how to deal with climate engineering, and that billionaires are looking at this as yet another frontier from which they can profit.

In a series of interviews, Calcalist spoke to various climate experts about innovative solutions to tackle the crisis.

“We won’t succeed in reducing greenhouse gas emissions to zero,” says Professor Yoram Rosen, head of the Space Research Institute at the Faculty of Physics at the Technion. “Let’s reduce what is heating the Earth – the rays of the sun.”

“By deploying a massive sunshade about 1.5 million kilometers from the Earth. Satellites will hold it in the air and orbit it with the Earth at the same pace, providing it with shade. If we spread such a sunshade, we can reduce about 2% of the sunlight reaching us from the sun, and the average temperature on Earth will decrease by about 1.5 degrees Celsius within a year. We’ll feel the impact immediately. In fact, those who will primarily experience the effect are those living under the designated shade, in regions close to the equator. But if the temperature there indeed drops, the global average will also decrease with it.”

For Rosen, this is no science fiction – he leads research precisely in how to shade the Earth. The large sunshade that Rosen and his colleagues at the Technion (with partners from the United Arab Emirates) are developing is supposed to be made of kapton, a material that reflects light and is 10 micrometers thick. It is used, among other things, in space blankets (which every pilot has) and satellites.

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