A new study debunks the idea that solar geoengineering is a temporary measure to reduce warming and meet climate targets.
A controversial idea for cooling the earth’s climate through artificial means would likely require a much longer global commitment than policymakers and the public understand, according to a recent study that raises new questions about the potential for using solar geoengineering.
If world leaders decide to use solar geoengineering to meet international climate goals, they could be locked into it for a century or more, the study suggests. The potentially long timeframe further complicates the debate about geoengineering and its viability.
Geoengineering is “often communicated as temporary, a stopgap measure — so it implies being relatively short, and short in the sense of a couple of decades,” said lead study author Susanne Baur, a doctoral candidate at the European Centre for Research and Advanced Training in Scientific Computation in France. “And so when we started looking at these pathways, and we extrapolated them a bit longer, we saw that in many cases, it’s actually not that short.”
The public may not realize the scope of a commitment solar geoengineering — or its risks, including the need for long-term international cooperation.
“If we have to keep up a system like this for such a long time, that just increases the possibility of something bad happening,” Baur said.