Planetary-scale engineering schemes designed to cool Earth's surface and lessen the impact of global heating are potentially dangerous and should be blocked by governments, more than 60 policy experts and scientists said on Monday.
"We therefore call for immediate political action from governments, the United Nations and other actors to prevent the normalization of solar geoengineering as a climate policy option."already boosted the intensity, frequency and durationThe world's nations have committed to capping the rise in Earth's surface temperature to 1.5C above mid-19th century levels, but UN-backed scientists have said that threshold will be breached, possibly within a decade.
Nature sometimes does the same: debris from the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines lowered Earth's average surface temperature for more than a year.Artificially dimming the Sun's radiative force is likely to disrupt monsoon rains in South Asia and western Africa, and could ravage the rain-fed crops upon which hundreds of millions depend for nourishment, several studies have shown.
If SRM"were terminated for any reason, there is high confidence that surface temperatures would increase rapidly," the IPCC said.The open letter Finally, there is currently no global governance system to monitor or implement solar geoengineering schemes, which could be set in motion today by a single country, or even a billionaire with rockets.