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Out of a superhero movie: Companies are coming up with plans to block out the sun.

Private companies are jumping into the race to deploy particles to the atmosphere to reduce global warming, prompting enthusiasm from investors and concerns from some scientists, Josh Marcus reports

Independent, 25 December 2025

A secretive team of scientists is working on an unprecedented plan to fill the atmosphere with tiny particles that imitate a volcanic eruption and block out the sun. It might save humanity, or it could spiral out of control. Thousands stand opposed to such a scheme, but these plans may move forward anyway.

This is not the plot of the next Marvel movie, but solar geoengineering, one of the very non-fictional frontiers of climate research.

In October, a start-up called Stardust Solutions announced it had raised $60 million to pursue technology that will bounce the sun’s light back into space using reflective, airborne particles.

It is the largest investment ever for a company pursuing such a strategy to cool our rapidly overheating planet, according to Politico, and builds off the firm’s previous $15 million funding series.

Stardust Solutions is one of a small but closely-watched group of companies and researchers pursuing such ideas in the hopes of making rapid gains on the climate crisis as international action remains perilously insufficient.

The basic idea is to limit how much of the sun’s energy reaches the Earth’s surface. While this won’t tackle the root cause of the climate crisis — still-rising greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels — “solar radiation modification” could reduce the global temperature and slow the melting of the polar ice caps, buying us all some much-needed time.

While the idea has been around since the mid-Sixties, small-scale outdoor experiments have only begun in the last two decades, including cloud seeding in Switzerland and testing salt spray’s impacts on the clouds above the Great Barrier Reef.

For every fledgling experiment, another project has been canceled in the face of public opposition. A 2024 effort spraying sea salt aerosols from a decommissioned air craft carrier in Alameda, California, was quickly shut down because of outrage from community members who said they were not consulted, while the Indigenous Saami people of Scandinavia were among those who opposed the aborted 2021 SCoPEx project in Sweden, arguing the plan to spray calcium carbonate dust into the atmosphere violated both their philosophy towards the Earth and would not be an impactful scientific strategy to stop the root causes of the climate crisis’

Despite these concerns, the daily glut of increasingly dire climate updates – including the recent news of the likely irreversible decline of ocean corals – has given new momentum to this once fringe idea.

A ‘human-safe’ particle spray

Stardust Solutions was founded in 2023 by Yanai Yedvab and Amyad Spector, nuclear physicists who met at an Israeli national laboratory, and particle physicist Eli Waxman, former chief scientist at the Israeli Atomic Energy Commission……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/dim-sun-climate-change-b2877722.html

December 28, 2025 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | climate change, Israel