Half-Assed Solar Geoengineering Is Worse Than Climate Change Itself (vice.com)

New submitter beccaf writes: Ecologists and climate scientists investigated the consequences of rapid initiation of solar geoengineering (pumping sulfuric aerosols into the atmosphere) in 2020 and then rapid termination of this solar geoengineering fifty years later. It provides only short-term benefits to biodiversity, and, if stopped abruptly, temperatures will soar faster than they would with climate change alone and the consequences to all living things will be even worse than if humans had never interfered in Earth's natural processes at all. The study has been published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution. Rebecca Flowers via Motherboard summarizes the effects of solar geoengineering, according to research conducted by Christopher Trisos, an ecologist at the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center, and his colleagues: "Initially, organisms stop having to change habitats in response to rising temperatures. Highly mobile species that had already moved, like migratory birds, might return to their original ecosystems, and species that were too slow to move before, like corals, have a higher chance of survival than they did before the geoengineering project began. After mere decades, though, living things in highly biodiverse areas like the Amazon Basin have to start moving again, as much as they would have to in a non-geoengineering scenario."

"Suddenly, it's 2070," Flowers continues. "Governments begin to disagree on how to handle climate change, and, besides, they can no longer afford to pump aerosols into the atmosphere. As a result, we stop pumping aerosols into the atmosphere. Then things really go to hell. The amount of warming that would have happened without geoengineering over fifty years is essentially squished into a decade..."

Comments

Re:Based on those reliable models...

[drinkypoo]

But, suppose we get to the point where our coastlines are being battered, and people are dying, and we still don't have a good model.

Suppose we don't have to suppose, because we're there already. That's the part you can't get denialists to accept, not the idea that it's possible for it to get bad enough that something should be done, but that it's already that bad. They'll deny that their local weather can be a sign of climate effects (what do they think weather is?) right up until they're drowning or on fire, or somehow both at once.