Europe should ban space mirrors and other untested tools being touted to reflect solar radiation back into space, the European Commission’s scientific experts noted on Monday, but said the door should be left open for further research.
The Guardian quoted the scientists as stressing that the risks and benefits of solar geoengineering or solar radiation modification are “highly uncertain”. They called for a moratorium on using then as a method to offset global heating.
Solar geoengineering is in the limelight as concerns rise around the scale of climate crisis across the globe. Different countries are seeing unprecedented temperature rises and natural disasters such as storms and floods of much higher intensities and frequencies.
Solar geoengineering not addressing root cause of climate change
Solar radiation modification (SRM) technologies are capable of cooling Earth by reducing the amount of sunlight hitting the planet. Proponents of the methods suggest they should be studied as global temperatures rise into uncharted territories.
But critics argue that solar geoengineering does not address the root cause of climate change – the greenhouse gases that continue to pollute the atmosphere. Some of these proposals could address the symptoms of climate change, but they do not address the cause entirely.
One fear is that facilitating research into solar radiation modification is likely to lead to a slippery slope that enables its use across the globe. Climate change remains in the limelight and global leaders and scientists try to find long-lasting solutions to the issue.
