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All signs indicate we are barrelling full speed toward the largest ‘Super El Niño‘ ever recorded. While the science community is awaiting official confirmation from NOAA on a Super El Niño the evidence suggests it will arrive two months earlier than any other El Niño ever recorded leading to widespread and potentially catastrophic extreme weather across the United States.
With the prospect of the most intense ‘Super El Niño’ in history this year, scientists this week published a new paper in the journal Science Advances titled ‘Targeted marine cloud brightening weakens subsequent El Niño.’ The paper proposes the controversial weather-altering technique, marine cloud brightening, could prevent future Super El Niños from forming.
Could Marine Cloud Brightening Actually Prevent A Super El Niño?
While El Niño is a naturally occurring weather phenomenon, a Super El Niño is driven in large part by the change of global weather patterns and an overall warmer planet. Super El Niño years are notorious in my home state of Florida for producing devastating tornado activity. The ‘Super’ weather pattern also leads to drought, famine, flooding, and more depending on the region.
So what exactly is Marine Cloud Brightening? At the moment, it is a theoretical branch of weather/climate science. The idea is spraying microscopic seawater particles into low-lying clouds making the clouds denser, whiter, and more reflective. This in turn reflects more of the sunlight back into space versus being absorbed here on earth at the surface level.
In theory, reflecting more sunlight back into space would lead to less heat, fewer wildfires, less flooding, and other impacts created by a Super El Niño. But it is entirely theoretical at this point. The University of Washington’s Department of Atmospheric and Climate Research has a great explainer on the fundamentals of marine cloud brightening and how cloud seeding can lead to cloud condensation nuclei which in turn can reflect more light back into space.
Will it work?
The new paper published this week claims “Marine cloud brightening (MCB), a solar geoengineering proposal to reduce long-term warming, could theoretically mitigate extremes by instead targeting seasonal-to-multiyear phenomena, such as El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO). Yet the effectiveness of regional MCB to deliberately modify ENSO has not been tested.”
But it stipulates MCB has not been tested in real-world settings. Because of the widespread implications of attempting this and the global impacts it might have, scientists have not been able to actually attempt this at scale.
However, they have been able to find naturally occurring instances of Marine Cloud Brightening (MCB) in the form of the 2019-2020 Australian wildfires. What they found is “MCB reproduces many of the key mechanisms identified from the wildfires including an immediate negative local shortwave forcing response and increase in cloud liquid water path in the SESP region. Cloud and radiative effects are followed by surface cooling and boundary layer drying, which leads to a slight northward shift of the mean distribution of precipitation near the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ) across the equatorial Pacific.”
In short, yes, it could work in theory. The wildfires in Australia over that time were found to have produced the same effects that would be created by cloud seeding, and they prompted the La Niña cooling effect. The study’s conclusion states “MCB can reproduce the simulated cloud brightening and La Niña–like responses from the 2019–2020 Australian wildfires. In addition, this supports the hypothesis from Fasullo et al. that low cloud brightening from the wildfires was an important contributor to the 2020–2021 La Niña.”
Obstacles Ahead
Despite all of this being theoretical, and producing desirable outcomes in theory, that has not stopped some outside of the scientific community from mobilizing against it long before the project has any legs.
In my home state of Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis signed Senate Bill 56 into law back in 2025 which bans any form of Cloud Seeding and makes it punishable by up to 5 years in prison and a fine of $100,000. Tennessee was the first state to ban cloud seeding back in 2024 and Montana also followed alongside Florida with a ban of its own.
For something like this to work, it would take global cooperation and that seems like a nearly insurmountable obstacle at this point. But again, marine cloud brightening preventing a Super El Niño is entirely theoretical at this point even if this recent study showed the Australian wildfires’ impact on the most recent La Niña.
With the impending Super El Niño to be announced in the coming days, followed by months of extreme weather through the Fall, Winter, and Spring, it is possible people in charge change their tune on ‘playing God’ when it comes to the weather. But is it really ‘playing God’ if we have the technology at our disposal to prevent catastrophic weather from occurring? Is that not the point of technological advances, to make life better and more hospitable for humans? I’d love to hear what you all think down below in the comments.