Scientists Have Plans to Cut Global Warming into Half Using this Method

A new study has suggested that plans to spray aerosol into the sky to stop global warming could actually work.

Harvard researchers simulated what would happen if carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions doubled – but ‘solar engineering’ was used to reduce the temperature build-up by half.

Scientists from Harvard, MIT, and Princeton worked on the study, which finds that if solar geoengineering was applied with the goal of halving global warming — rather than using enough aerosols to attempt to completely offset all warming — there may be global benefits without the presumed extreme side effects. Those side effects include temperature and precipitation extremes and a disrupted water cycle.

“Some of the problems identified in earlier studies where solar geoengineering offset all warming are examples of the old adage that the dose makes the poison,” Harvard University physicist David Keith explains.

“Big uncertainties remain, but climate models suggest that geoengineering could enable surprisingly uniform benefits.”