Will space geoengineering help us control the climate?

In some countries, the prolonged lack of rain creates severe drought conditions, while others are constantly threatened by waves of flood water. Bad weather varies drastically from country to country, but climate change is common around the world: global temperatures continue to rise steadily. As modern technology advances and our understanding of weather processes, scientists are discovering new ways to control the climate. Instead of succumbing to nature's agenda, projects are underway to rain the skies, remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and prevent extreme weather events such as hurricanes and floods.

The reasons for weather manipulation may vary from the convenient to the essential. Geoengineering is the term used to describe the manipulation of weather to combat the effects of global warming. These methods are generally divided into two categories: carbon dioxide removal and solar geoengineering.

Geoengineering projects are all created to change the Earth's climate. While many are intended for use on ocean surfaces and in the Earth's atmosphere, not all of these projects are made to work on our planet. Entering space means being closer to the sun, and much of the geoengineering technology predicted for Earth's orbit involves manipulating the sunlight that illuminates our planet.

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The first idea for this form of space technology came from engineer James Early in 1989. His concept involved the construction of a gigantic 2,000-kilometer-wide sheet of glass, according to the British Interplanetary Society.

Orbiting the Earth, this glass structure would serve as a barrier between the sun and the Earth, reflecting sunlight into space and reducing the radiation entering the Earth's atmosphere. This solid, substantial-sized structure would be incredibly expensive to fly into space and would likely have to be assembled in space. But space assembly is a technology currently being tested, according to the Chinese Journal of Aeronautics.

Since we don't have a long-term human presence on another planetary body, some of the scientists currently have predicted a series more manageable than smaller mirror satellites and areas of dense asteroid dust to act as a solar barrier.