[LINK] "Study: Geoengineering Can’t Adjust Earth’s Thermostat to Everyone’s Liking"

[rfmcdonald]

80 Beats' Andrew Moseman writes about the unsurprising news that humans cannot control geoengineering techniques--man-made interventions in the climate--nearly finely enough to simulate "normal" conditions, even though doing so may well be better than doing nothing and letting an embrittled climate system break down.

Those who would argue “absolutely not” to the latter got a boost by a new study out in Nature Geoscience. Katharine Ricke and her team modeled the effects of one of the most popular geoengineering plans: seeding the atmosphere with aerosols to reflect away some of the sun’s rays, mimicking the way a massive volcanic eruption can cool the Earth. Ricke found that the effects on rainfall and temperature could vary wildly by region—and that what’s best for one country could spell disaster for another.

For example, Ricke says, her study found that levels of sulphate that kept China closest to its baseline climate were so high that they made India cold and wet. Those that were best for India caused China to overheat. She notes, however, that both countries fared better either way than under a no-geoengineering policy.

Given the complex connectivity of the climate system, it’s not possible to fix everything to everybody’s liking. While the team’s study shows that geoengineers could control either temperature or precipitation pretty well by fine-tuning their atmospheric seeding, they couldn’t control both at once.

“People won’t agree on what level of geoengineering is desirable,” says Myles Allen of the University of Oxford, who was involved in the study. “It works, but it won’t work the same way for everyone”