Geoengineering our climate is not a ‘quick fix’

[OKIsItJustMe]

http://www.leeds.ac.uk/news/article/3631/geoengineering_our_climate_is_not_a_quick_fix

[font face=Serif][font size=5]Geoengineering our climate is not a ‘quick fix’[/font]

Published Wednesday 26 November 2014

[font size=3]The deliberate, large-scale intervention in the Earth’s climate system is not a “quick fix” for global warming, according to the findings of the UK’s first publicly funded studies on geoengineering.

The results of three projects – IAGP, led by the University of Leeds; SPICE, led by the University of Bristol; and CGG, led by the University of Oxford – are announced at an event held at The Royal Society, London, on 26 November 2014.

Professor Piers Forster, Professor of Physical Climate Change at the University of Leeds, and the principal investigator of the Integrated Assessment of Geoengineering Proposals (IAGP) project, said: “Our research shows that the devil is in the detail. Geoengineering will be much more expensive and challenging than previous estimates suggest and any benefits would be limited.

“For example, when simulating the spraying of sea salt particles into clouds to try to brighten them, we found that only a few clouds were susceptible and that the particles would tend to coagulate and fall out before reaching the cloud base.”

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[caraher]

1. Worse still might be if it works

Alan Robock has a big list of problems with geoengineering... one of them is that they tend to be very long-term commitments; once begun, any disruption can have worse impacts than doing nothing.

The basic reason is that if you use a solar radiation management scheme to slow temperature rise, then, for any reason, stop, the subsequent temperature rise will be much more rapid than it would have been had you done nothing. And the speed of the increase affects the ability of ecosystems to adapt to the change - a fast rise will generally result in more extinctions and other disruptions than a slow one.