Listed above is the title of an article published on 7th December by the Climate News Network which asserts that geo-engineering whereby, the planets thermostat is controlled by blocking, absorbing or reflecting some of the sunlight hitting the Earth, would not work to fix climate change.
This conclusion is made in response to two recently published papers that both arrive at the same result - that you cannot fix climate change by reducing solar radiation due to the effects this would have on rainfall patterns. The first paper to make this conclusion was published by a US led group of scientists while the more recent paper was published by Axel Kleidon and Maik Renner of the Plank Institute for Biogeochemistry in Jena, Germany.
The papers arrive at this assertion by highlighting the different responses of sunlight and surface warming on the hydrologic cycle and on vertical transport within the atmosphere. As such SRM geo-engineering that compensates for 2 degrees of warming causes the water cycle to weaken by 2% and vertical transport by almost 8%.
This research on SRM leaves me particularly skeptical about the viability of the various methods I have discussed thus far in this blog, particularly as much of the research on the various methods puts forward impacts upon precepitation as a possible side effect. Thus it is with skepticism that I embark on the second part of my geo-engineering journey which looks at the various Carbon Dioxide Removal techniques that have been proposed as a solution to fix climate change.
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