We Already Have Planet-Cooling Technology. The Problem Is, It's Killing Us.

The Agung volcano erupts, spewing magma and ash thousands of feet into the air on the island of Bali in Indonesia in November 2017.Josh Edelson/ZUMA This story was originally published by Grist and appears here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. A trope of sci-fi movies these days, from Snowpiercer to Geostorm, is that our failure to tackle climate change will eventually force us to deploy an arsenal of unproven technologies to save the planet. Think sun-deflecting space mirrors or chemically altered clouds. And because these are sci-fi movies, it's assumed that these grand experiments in geoengineering will go horribly wrong. The fiction, new evidence suggests, may be much closer to reality than we thought.