As part of the fight against global warming, Harvard employees propose rather categorical measures - to spray microparticles at an altitude of about 20 kilometers, which will partially reflect and scatter sunlight. According to their data, the idea is safe for the inhabitants of the Earth.
This idea, known as solar geoengineering, already has many opponents: critics warn that artificially reflecting sunlight to cool the planet could have drastic unintended consequences. A team of scientists from Harvard insists that such fears are exaggerated.
In their new paper, which is published in the journal Nature Climate Change, the researchers argue that spraying chemicals into the atmosphere to “darken the sun” was never meant to be a universal remedy for burning fossil fuels. However, if used carefully to halve the global rise in temperature, such measures are quite safe.
Climate models, they said, suggest that geoengineering can produce the expected positive results. The idea of geoengineering has been around for more than half a century, and since then over 100 papers have explored the possibilities of this seemingly radical measure to cool the planet using atmospheric particles reflecting sunlight. Harvard scientists have gone further by launching the world's largest solar geoengineering study, which is expected to conduct its first field experiments later this year to actually see how these chemicals behave in the sky.
The new article provides simulations of what would happen if atmospheric CO2 emissions were doubled and solar geoengineering was used to halve the temperature rise from carbon buildup. According to the findings, which, as the researchers admit, can only be considered a simplified “idealized” scenario, a moderate geoengineering strategy will cool the planet without aggravating climatic stresses for the vast majority of regions, that is, without provoking extreme precipitation or severe hurricanes. In general, according to experts, 85 percent of the increase in hurricane intensity will be offset by solar geoengineering and less than 0.4 percent of the land not covered with ice will feel the aggravation of climatic loads.
“Previous work has suggested that solar geoengineering will inevitably lead to 'winners' and 'losers', and some regions will bear the brunt of the consequences of these measures. Our work challenges this assumption: we see a significant reduction in climate risk overall without a significant increase in risk for any particular region,”the authors of the article argue.
Dmitry Mazalev
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