Climate engineering cannot help us in erasing climate change

Researchers have said that climate engineering cannot help us erase whatever has happened to climate change.

After evaluating a range of possible climate-altering approaches to dissipating greenhouse gases and reducing warming, the interdisciplinary team concluded there's no way around it. We have to reduce the amount of carbon being released into the atmosphere.

Co-author, Jonn Axsen, assistant professor in SFU's School of Resource and Environmental Management, said some climate engineering strategies look very cheap on paper.

He said when other criteria, like ecological risk, public perceptions and the abilities of governments to control the technology, is considered some options look very bad.

It states reducing emissions, through some combination of switching away from fossil fuels to low-carbon energy sources, improving energy efficiency, and changing human behaviour, is still the most effective way of confronting climate change.

The authors note though that some approaches to climate engineering are more promising than others, and they should be used to augment efforts to reduce the climate-change effects resulting from human activity. For example, strategies such as forest management and geological storage of carbon dioxide may be useful complements.

Working under the auspices of the National Science Foundation, the authors spent two years evaluating more than 100 studies that addressed the various implications of climate engineering and their anticipated effects on greenhouse gases.

The study has been published in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment.