Jun 30, 2026 · 39 min · 13 segments
The planet is heating up, every plan to stop it has fallen short, and growing group of scientists has started to ask a stranger question: what if we grabbed the thermostat ourselves? Ben Bradford…
Kate RickeGuest
Alan RobockGuest[airplane roaring] Around the time President Lyndon Johnson was allowing rain attacks on Vietnam, his science advisory council inked a massive tome of an environmental report.
One section read, "The possibilities of offsetting climate change need to be thoroughly explored." Yes, we knew about climate change back then.
The report offered a geoengineering solution, a rough proposal of what would become this.
Have airplanes fly high, really high above the clouds, above rain, where the air is too thin to breathe.
Gases, or it could be liquids that then, once you spray them or release them into the stratosphere, they turn into these little droplets.
The particles fly out around the globe, and then in the thin, dry air, just sit there, hanging, meditating.
They sit in the atmosphere for a long time 'cause they're so small that it takes a long time for them to fall out.
againYou would have to have a fleet of airplanes constantly emitting more material so that you have an even distribution of these reflective particles where you want them all the time reflecting that sunlight.
It's also the same basic idea that showed up in a certain essay in the mid-2000s [gasp] and kickstarted this whole industry.
To recap it, a fleet of airplanes spray little, tiny droplets acting as little mirrors to make the entire sky reflect sunlight.
[airplane roaring] Around the time President Lyndon Johnson was allowing rain attacks on Vietnam, his science advisory council inked a massive tome of an environmental report.
One section read, "The possibilities of offsetting climate change need to be thoroughly explored." Yes, we knew about climate change back then.
The report offered a geoengineering solution, a rough proposal of what would become this.
Have airplanes fly high, really high above the clouds, above rain, where the air is too thin to breathe.
Gases, or it could be liquids that then, once you spray them or release them into the stratosphere, they turn into these little droplets.
The particles fly out around the globe, and then in the thin, dry air, just sit there, hanging, meditating.
They sit in the atmosphere for a long time 'cause they're so small that it takes a long time for them to fall out.
againYou would have to have a fleet of airplanes constantly emitting more material so that you have an even distribution of these reflective particles where you want them all the time reflecting that sunlight.
It's also the same basic idea that showed up in a certain essay in the mid-2000s [gasp] and kickstarted this whole industry.
To recap it, a fleet of airplanes spray little, tiny droplets acting as little mirrors to make the entire sky reflect sunlight.
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