Reducing Emissions Will Be Primary Way to Fight Climate Change

Forget about positioning giant mirrors in space to reduce the amount of sunlight being trapped in Earth's atmosphere or seeding clouds to reduce the amount of light entering earth's atmosphere.  Those approaches to climate engineering aren't likely to be effective or practical in slowing global warming.

A new report by professors from UCLA and five other universities concludes that there's no way around it: We have to cut down the amount of carbon being released into the atmosphere.  The interdisciplinary team looked at a range of possible approaches to dissipating greenhouse gases and reducing warming.

"We found that climate engineering doesn't offer a perfect option," said Daniela Cusack, the study's lead author and an assistant professor of geography in UCLA's College of Letters and Science.  "The perfect option is reducing emissions.  We have to cut down the amount of emissions we're putting into the atmosphere if, in the future, we want to have anything like the Earth we have now."

Still, the study concluded, some approaches to climate engineering are more promising than others, and they should be used to augment efforts to reduce the 9 gigatons of carbon dioxide being released each year by human activity.  (A gigaton is 1 billion tons.)

The first scholarly attempt to rank a wide range of approaches to minimizing climate change in terms of their feasibility, cost-effectiveness, risk, public acceptance, governability and ethics, the study appears in the latest issue of the peer-reviewed scholarly journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment.

Of the five options the group evaluated, sequestering carbon through biological means -- or converting atmospheric carbon into solid sources of carbon like plants -- holds the most promise.  One source, curbing the destruction of forests and promoting growth of new forests, could tie up as much as 1.3 gigatons of carbon in plant material annually, the team calculated.  Deforestation now is responsible for adding 1 gigaton of carbon each year to the atmosphere.

Reducing Emissions Will Be Primary Way to Fight Climate Change, study finds