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

Based on those reliable models...

[bradley13]

All of this, of course, is based on those oh-so-reliable models that can't account for the "pause" and generally fail to distinguish adequately between natural and anthropogenic warming. Just the kind of basis you want to use as the basis for a massive experiment with the planet's atmosphere.

First understand. Then tinker.

At the moment, the models generally fail to make any specific and falsifiable predictions. Where people have tried to make such predictions, based on the models, they have generally been wrong. It's not clear that current models are any better than the Farmer's Almanac.