At the end of December, the American start-up Make Sunsets claimed to have launched several meteorological balloons earlier in the year, in the Baja California peninsula in Mexico, in order to release sulfur particles into the stratosphere, which were supposed to obscure sunlight. The Mexican Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources responded by announcing on January 13 a ban on solar geo-engineering projects, in order to “protect communities and the environment”.
Solar geoengineering consists of sending particles into the stratosphere – in this case, sulfur – to create an umbrella which, by reflecting sunlight, will limit the rise in temperature. And therefore oppose the impact of greenhouse gases. Reproducing a phenomenon that occurs in particular during volcanic eruptions, during which huge quantities of ash and droplets of sulfuric acid are propelled into the atmosphere. For example, regarding a year following the Pinatubo eruption in the Philippines in 1991 — which injected more than 15 million tons of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere — global average temperatures have dropped by regarding 0.5°C.
In 2021, an aborted Harvard project
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