Ars Technica: Ecological impacts of solar geoengineering are highly uncertain. New research describes the unknowns in our knowledge of solar geoengineering.
Without condoning or condemning the poorly understood tactic, recent reports suggest we should try to understand one proposed strategy to cool the planet: altering the atmosphere to reflect sunlight. Called solar radiation modification (SRM), this strategy is a type of geoengineering that involves scattering particles into the sky to reflect sunlight back out into space so it can’t warm the Earth’s atmosphere.
In theory, SRM could cool off the planet and help limit global warming to 1.5ºC compared to preindustrial levels. But it’s viewed as something of a last-resort tool to tackle climate change. Two new analyses explore what deploying this tactic could mean for the environment and the flora, fauna, and people living in it. In all, the authors of both reports suggest that more work needs to be done to understand SRM.