climate change

Could Solar Geoengineering Work to Counteract Climate Change?

NBCUniversal Media, LLC

Scientists around the world are modeling and researching ways to counteract the warming that greenhouse gas emissions have caused on our planet.

One potential method is injecting aerosols in the upper levels of the atmosphere in an effort to recreate the cooling effects from a volcano eruption. This is called solar geoengineering.

The idea is that they would place reflective particles about 12 to 16 miles above the earth, causing some of the sun’s rays to be reflected back out into space.

A Stanford scientist is part of a research team who released a report in the National Academy of Sciences. They found that even if solar geoengineering was applied, it would take years to stabilize global temperatures.

Noah Diffenbaugh, professor at Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability, says: "Those particles being injected high into the atmosphere where they can block out, not all of the sunlight obviously, but a small fraction of the sunlight. We know that can have a short term cooling effect. It’s not spatially uniform. So that’s a relatively cheap, relatively effective potential intervention at the global scale that’s likely to have a lot of side effects.

"The root cause of global warming is our greenhouse gas emissions and the only way to truly stabilize the climate system is to reach net zero emissions," Diffenbaugh continued. "And that’s not a political statement. That’s just a statement about the physics of the planet Earth."

Watch the full interview above on how solar geoengineering works and if it’s even viable based on his research.

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