The world is not cutting emissions fast enough to prevent global temperatures from spiking into dangerous territory, slashing crop yields
and decimating food production in many parts of the world, as well as flooding coastal cities while parching large swaths of the globe, killing perhaps millions of mostly poor people from heat stress alone.
While it is known that solar radiation management can cool the atmosphere, fears
that field research would look too much like deployment have so far limited research pretty much to computer modeling of its effects and small-scale experiments in the lab.
Barring some technology that could pull it out at a reasonable cost — a long shot for the foreseeable future, according
to many scientists — it will stay there for a long time, warming the atmosphere further for decades to come.
While many of the scholars gathered in Washington expressed misgivings about deploying geoengineering technologies, there was a near-universal consensus on the need to invest more in research — not only into the power to cool the atmosphere
but also into the potential side effects on the atmosphere’s chemistry and on weather patterns in different world regions.
“If the United States starts going backwards or not going forward fast enough in terms of emissions reductions, then more
and more people will start talking about these options,” said Mr. Pasztor, a former United Nations assistant secretary general on climate change.
Critically, the academics noted, the research agenda must include an open, international debate about the governance structures
necessary to deploy a technology that, at a stroke, would affect every society and natural system in the world.
Last month, scholars from the physical and social sciences who are interested in climate change gathered in Washington to discuss approaches like cooling the planet by shooting
aerosols into the stratosphere or whitening clouds to reflect sunlight back into space, which may prove indispensable to prevent the disastrous consequences of warming.