Could Geo-engineering Help Mitigate Climate Change Realistically?

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A new study in the journal Nature Climate Change warns that by the 2100, the planet has only a 5 percent chance of limiting temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-Industrial Age levels — a threshold above which many climatologists warn truly scary things will happen to Earth’s atmosphere and oceans.

Their first ingredient is one of the most prominent ideas in geoengineering — spraying aerosols into the stratosphere to reflect some of the sun’s incoming rays back into space.

Climate models suggest this approach would reduce global rainfall, however, because when beams of sunlight hit the Earth, they warm the oceans and cause evaporation, which in turn falls back down as rain.

Caldeira and his colleagues looked at combining the stratospheric aerosol technique with another approach — thinning high cirrus clouds, which are involved in regulating the amount of heat that escapes from the planet to outer space.

Yet the climate model examined by Caldeira and his team has an unresolved drawback, he said. The overall level of precipitation would stabilize, but rainfall would likely be redistributed around the globe, potentially overrunning some areas and drying out others.