MOHAMMED USROF, DISHA RAVI, HELEEN BRUGGINK, and ERICA NJUGUNA
We have grown up in a world where climate change is apparent everywhere. We see it in our stormy skies and in the floodwaters inundating our communities. We feel it in our throats and lungs when we inhale polluted air, and on our skin as we walk down the street during heat waves. World leaders would convene every year to make decisions and deals, compromises and commitments, always falling far short of delivering what was needed to mitigate and, increasingly, to adapt to climate change. This year’s United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP29) was no exception.
All this inertia has spurred some to try to find a way around the hard work of ending harmful greenhouse-gas emissions, protecting critical ecosystems, and rethinking economic growth and development. One proposed “solution,” being pushed by a small but vocal minority in the Global North, is solar geoengineering, which involves modifying Earth’s atmosphere to create a reflective barrier against the sun’s radiation. For today’s youth and future generations, however, such interventions threaten to be as catastrophic as climate change.
Solar geoengineering can take many forms, including the release of huge amounts of sulfur particles into the stratosphere to create a reflective barrier against sunlight (stratospheric aerosol injection) and the injection of salt spray into shallow marine clouds (marine cloud brightening). But it never addresses the root causes of the climate crisis, and it involves modifying our planet’s atmosphere in ways that cannot be adequately tested at scale, with effects that will last decades or longer.
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