Climate scientists and policymakers have long warned of a dangerous threshold: If global temperatures rise more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial averages, we risk devastating consequences, including severe flooding, heat waves, and drought.
Climate scientists and policymakers have long warned of a dangerous threshold: If global temperatures rise more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial averages, we risk devastating consequences, including severe flooding, heat waves, and drought. Yet surpassing that grim marker now seems almost inevitable.
One potential way to keep the harms of climate change at bay is geoengineering—deliberate intervention in the Earth’s climate system. The most widely studied form of geoengineering, called Solar Radiation Modification (SRM), involves introducing sunlight-reflecting aerosols into the atmosphere to temporarily cool the planet. Although SRM has never been deployed, it mimics a process that occurs naturally after major volcanic activity. For example, the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo is believed to have cooled the planet by about 0.5 degrees Celsius over the following two years because of the massive quantities of sulfur dioxide it released.
This approach is controversial; even one of the world’s leading geoengineering experts has described it as “a brutally ugly technical fix.” SRM addresses only the symptoms of climate change (increasing temperatures), not the cause (greenhouse gas emissions). It may also carry other, poorly understood risks, including shifts in regional climate and rainfall that could disrupt agriculture.
Read More: Yale University
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