Sunshades
I wrote a longish feature for Nature this week on geoengineering. It goes into various details perhaps a little deeper than some accounts have, and of course also leaves out stuff that in an ideal world it would have got in. The bottom line is that lowering the earth’s average temperature by putting long-lived particles of some sort into the stratosphere is, as has long been known, technologically feasible, and would alter the course of, but not completely stop, climate change. Crucially, as yet we cannot predict with any confidence what the net changes under a warming+cooling regime would be, and though there are signs they might be a little smaller than was once thought they could easily be large enough to be complete showstoppers. Read more
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