With a strong El Niño running the show this summer, could it be possible to just turn it down?

According to a new study, the answer is yes (at least inside a climate computer model), but is this even feasible, and if it is, is it a road we want to go down?

Right now, El Niño is expected to keep strengthening into winter, with an 81% chance of ranking "very strong." On the positive side, it could help keep a lid on Atlantic hurricanes, but El Niño has much farther-reaching impacts than hurricanes — it reshuffles weather around the globe, for better or worse.

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So scientists ask: If El Niño causes so much trouble, could we just turn it down?

Take a deep breath.

(MORE: Here's what El Niño really does to your weather)

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How scientists say we could 'turn down' El Niño

The team ran simulations of a technique called marine cloud brightening. The idea works by spraying fine sea-salt particles into low clouds over the ocean to make them brighter. Then, those clouds reflect more sunlight and cool the water below.

When the researchers modeled that technique over a patch of the eastern Pacific, the simulated El Niño weakened. Researchers also note that starting the treatment months ahead of an event's peak did more than starting late.

A separate study from the University of California, Santa Barbara, published in the journal Earth's Future, compared marine cloud brightening with the more famous "dim the sun" approach. This is done by injecting aerosols high in the stratosphere to reflect sunlight everywhere at once.

Brightening clouds over that specific Pacific patch cut El Niño's swings by roughly 60%. Dimming the sun globally? It barely nudged the pattern at all.

More questions than answers

This is where the excitement needs a cold glass of water.

Every bit of this happened in simulations, not in the actual ocean, and not, most importantly, at real scale. Nobody has weakened an El Niño. And nobody is close.

“It works in the model" comes with a warning label. James Haywood, a climate scientist at the University of Exeter who wasn't involved in the new paper, put it bluntly: There are "many, many unanswered questions and uncertainties as to the viability" of marine cloud brightening.

His own earlier work found that cooling the eastern Pacific too aggressively could backfire, potentially triggering a "mega La Niña" far stronger than anything we've seen. In other words, dial one knob down and you might slam another one up.

The UCSB team raised the same red flag. Lead author Chen Xing warned against actually deploying this over the eastern Pacific because it "might cause super strong chain reactions." Reflecting that much sunlight can also cut into photosynthesis, impacting crops, forests and the ocean algae that produce much of our oxygen.

Since El Niño and La Niña don't distribute their effects evenly, one region's relief can be another's disaster. Who decides whose weather gets adjusted?

Even the scientists doing the work are waving off the idea that this is a plan. Marine cloud brightening "isn't anywhere close to being on the menu," said Jessica Wan, a climate scientist who led the study at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego.

Cornell's Daniele Visioni called the research "really interesting and very new,” but "in no way the final answer."

There's a reason the scientific community treats this cautiously. The American Meteorological Society's official statement on climate intervention, adopted in 2022, supports studying these techniques so leaders have real knowledge if hard choices arrive this decade. It does not endorse flipping the switch.

We may be inching toward understanding whether humanity could turn down El Niño. However, whether we should (and who would ever get to decide) is the far bigger question.

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