Geoengineering or Climate Engineering includes Natural Climate Solutions, Solar Radiation Management and Carbon Dioxide Removal approaches.
Geoengineering refers to large-scale interventions in the Earth’s oceans, soils and atmosphere with the aim of reducing the effects of climate change, usually temporarily. The two main categories of proposed geoengineering techniques are:. * **Solar Radiation Modification (SRM):** SRM techniques, which are also referred to as solar geoengineering, attempt to deal with the symptoms of climate change by reflecting sunlight away from the Earth or allowing more heat back into space. In addition, various **weather modification** techniques exist, such as cloud seeding, which aim to change weather and precipitation patterns without changing the climate more broadly. Climate engineering proposals represent efforts to manipulate the climate on a global scale, but each proposed technique brings its own environmental and social impacts. While geoengineering techniques and technologies vary in scope and scale (see: Technologies), **a few important characteristics apply to all of them**:. * See our geoengineering technologies page for specifics on the different schemes.
Geoengineering is the deliberate large-scale interventions in the Earth's climate system intended to counteract human-caused climate change.
Methods range from sucking carbon straight out of the air to the large-scale burning of trees for energy, capturing and storing the emissions,
Researchers have proposed various methods to curb the effects of climate change by reflecting sunlight away from the planet. Stratospheric
Geoengineering proposes to take much more proactive measures such as injecting aerosol into the stratosphere to increase solar reflection.
Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) techniques, which remove CO2 from the atmosphere. · Solar Radiation Management (SRM) techniques, which reflect a small percentage of
However, research shows that using solar geoengineering could indirectly lower the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere by stemming permafrost melt, reducing energy-sector emissions and causing changes to the carbon-cycle feedback. Aerosol injection could have an edge on other proposed forms of solar geoengineering because it would not require a large technological leap to become a reality, Jones says:. These brighter clouds would reflect away more sunlight, says Prof Douglas MacMartin, an engineering researcher from Cornell University, who contributed to the US House of Representatives’ hearing on geoengineering. Earlier this month, MacMartin, Keith and Prof Katharine Ricke, a climate scientist from the University of California, San Diego, published a research paper exploring how solar geoengineering – via releasing aerosols into the stratosphere – could be used as part of an “overall strategy” for limiting global warming to 1.5C, which is the aspirational target of the Paris Agreement. However, the researchers point out that using solar geoengineering to hold global warming to 1.5C would not have the same environmental effect as reaching the target using mitigation.