The writer is a science commentator
Amid rising global temperatures and widespread heatwaves, metaphorical storm clouds are gathering. Last month, a city council in California voted unanimously to halt an experiment into a potential climate-fixing technology.
The trial, which university researchers had already begun, involved spraying sea salt particles into the clouds above San Francisco Bay. The experiment was meant to test whether making clouds brighter could reflect more sunlight back into space, and thereby cool the local climate. The clampdown by Alameda City Council follows the scrapping earlier this year of a Harvard University project to release sulphur particles into the stratosphere above Sweden.