Climate journalist Sara Schonhardt penned an important report on concerns about how “[r]adical climate interventions — like blocking the sun’s rays — could alter the world’s weather patterns, potentially benefiting some regions of the world and harming others.”
The main concerns:
“Climate scientists are, by and large, wary of such intervention. While limiting the amount of sunlight that reaches the Earth could rapidly cool the planet, they say, such efforts wouldn’t address ocean acidification and other harms associated with burning fossil fuels, the primary cause of global warming.
It’s also unclear how solar radiation management, or SRM, would affect global weather patterns, such as the monsoon rains that are crucial in some regions of the Global South. While it could ease climate impacts in one area of the world, SRM might reduce crop yields or threaten water supplies in another area.”
Understandably then “any research on such methods must consider those risks and involve the countries that already bear the greatest impacts from a warming planet.”
A United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) report “recommends a scientific review process based on models and observations that could guide potential research and future governance. If such an assessment determines that SRM deployment would lead to negative consequences, ‘consideration of deployment could be taken off the table,’ the report concludes.”
Read the full article here.
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