Seattle, Washington - What if that bright, hot thing at the center of our solar system just chilled out a little bit? Well, reducing the sun's intensity is exactly what climate researchers using the Amazon Web Services cloud decided to test.

According to Gizmodo, scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado used Amazon's cloud computing to model 30 different climate change futures, and one scenario tests what would happen if the atmosphere was thicker, effectively dimming the sun.

The researchers wanted to see what other options are out there for fighting climate change, which is caused in part by the greenhouse effect.

When the sun's energy hits our planet, it tends to bounce around between the surface of the planet and different layers of the atmosphere, much like if the planet were a giant greenhouse.

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So, if you dial down the amount of sunlight that gets into our planet's atmosphere, you end up with less energy, and less warming.

There is a catch, of course. Terraforming, or changing our planet, is a double-edged sword, as man-made climate change itself shows.

There is a legitimate concern that once the process of changing the Earth's atmosphere gets rolling, we won't be able to stop it, and trading the climate crisis for a sunlight crisis is not a good deal.

Until now, scientists have used immensely powerful supercomputers to run simulated climate scenarios that try to map out how our planet might change in the future.

But those supercomputers are few and far between, and are not easy to get your hands on.

What is more available and has a huge amount of processing power is Amazon's Web Service cloud, which this set of simulations showed to be a useful tool that could make climate modelling more accessible.

That would be a big step forward in climate action, because it would enable more people, especially policymakers or scientists who don't have access to a supercomputer, to get down to the business of figuring out what lies ahead in our changing climate.

Dimming the sun is certainly an interesting idea for dealing with climate change, but it's one of those "silver bullet" solutions that don't exist yet, and aren't really necessary. We already have the technology to stop climate change – like using green hydrogen – and could do so without risking a sunless sky.