Science is an art of exploration. The dedication of the explorers is sometimes directed by other discoveries, a chance encounter or simply just the pure serendipity of a crazy idea.

The effects of global warming started to be a concern for scientists during the early 1960s. Acid rain was the environmental issue of the day and the research into the problem led to wondering about the effects of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.


President Lyndon Johnson was the first US President to be informed about the potential effects of global warming could have on the environment.

A panel of scientists, advisors to the President, suggested that there might be merit in placing reflective material on the oceans surface to deflect sunlight back into space before it contributed to further warming of the planet.

It is assumed that President Johnson had other larger issues to deal with, Vietnam being one of them. 

It would be a while before scientists decided that attacking the problem of controlling the generation of greenhouse gases might be a more prudent approach to changing global warming.

But the idea of deflecting the sun’s warming rays still persists.

Roger Angel is a case in point.

Angel is the Director of the Center for Astronomical Research at the University of Arizona and he wants to put a series of reflective mesh into space.

The huge network of mesh would control the incoming sunlight by redirecting it harmlessly back into space.

This is not a small project. Angel envisions that 16 trillion extremely light spacecraft would have to launched and combined into a tight network of reflectors each sitting a kilometer apart from each other.

Angel estimates that it would take over 30 years to launch all of the necessary spacecraft.

In all Angel would have to launch over 50 million tones of material into space.

With that much control over the incoming sunlight, or the lack of it, begs the question of political or environmental power.

Who controls the controls?

“Lets say Europe and North America don’t reduce their carbon emissions, and China has a decade long drought,” says Ken Caldeira, a scientist at the Carnegie Institute Department of Global Ecology.

“It [China] could say, ‘You guys wrecked our climate, and we are going to engineer our own climate to repair things’.”

A portent of climate weapons being deployed in the future?

“The simplest thing is to stop putting in the gases that cause the warming,” says Alan Robock, a Professor in the Department of Environmental Sciences at Rutgers University.

Science is full of sci-fi doomsday scenarios but as we continue to grapple with the lack of political will, or even logical direction, to deal with our planetary problems some of these concepts maybe just be what we could be forced to turn to in the future.

We will be offering more of these original and radical concepts in a series “Un-boxed Science” over the next few weeks. If you have any suggestions please contact us.