Washington, United States
The billionaire American tech entrepreneur, Bill Gates, is funding an ambitious geoengineering project initiated by scientists at the Harvard University aimed at releasing tons of non-toxic calcium carbonate powder into the atmosphere, to reduce the amount of sunlight and thus counteract the effects of global warming.
Various studies related to geo-engineering projects solar systems have stagnated in recent years due to criticism of the unpredictable dangers they can pose when applied to such magnitude.
Given the risk of climate change, the Controlled Stratospheric Perturbation Experiment (SCoPEx) plans to investigate the feasibility of spraying dust from calcium carbonate (CaCO 3) into the atmosphere by means of balloons.
LEA: A man spends three months in hiding at an airport for fear of Covid-19
The intriguing and promising project, funded and supervised by the founder of Microsoft, develops technology that may reflect sunlight off the planet and thereby cool it.
In June this year, SCoPEx is expected to send a balloon with scientific objectives 20 km high near the city of Kiruna (Sweden) to maneuverability of equipment that will be used. If the tests are successful, the project will move to a second phase where a small amount of the compound is released.
There are critics of this kind scientific proposals who claim that this would cause extreme changes in weather patterns, in addition to an argument for the disproportionate emissions of polluting gases in the atmosphere.
The professor of applied physics at Harvard University, David Keith, has raised the issue, arguing that there are “many real concerns” about geoengineering as no one knows what could happen until CaCO 3 is released and its effects studied, which could be good or bad are for the Country.