The World Needs to Explore Solar Geoengineering as a Tool to Fight Climate Change

Solar geoengineering, also called solar climate intervention, is the idea that humans could make the planet a bit more reflective to reduce temperatures and other climate changes caused by accumulating carbon emissions. But at what cost?

A casual observer will read that geoengineering causes droughts, makes weather less predictable, dims the blue sky, and threatens the food supply of billions who depend on monsoon rains. And that's the short list. But is it fair?

A technology's risks depend on how it's used. Antibiotics save lives, but if overused to make cheap beef in feedlots they breed deadly antibiotic-resistant bacteria. As with other technologies, the risks of geoengineering cannot be evaluated without a scenario for goals and governance. Like antibiotics, geoengineering could be deadly if overused.

A worthy goal for solar geoengineering is to slow climate change without making any region worse off. Plausible methods include spraying sea salt into the air to brighten marine clouds or injecting sulfur into the stratosphere to reflect some sunlight back to space. A fairly uniform application of geoengineering across the globe is less prone to make some regions worse off because atmospheric teleconnections mean that a strong localized application may cause unwanted climate changes elsewhere....