Science Focus
original post »Although a growing number of countries are taking steps to reduce their carbon emissions, we're still nowhere close to where we need to be if we want to limit future temperature changes to 2 degrees Celsius. If the coming temperature changes become too disruptive, our future selves may wish that our present selves hadn't released so much carbon.
But they will have options other than looking back with regret. It's possible with existing technologies to pull carbon from the air or to limit the sunlight reaching Earth. These forms of geoengineering are the subject of a new report by the National Academies of Science, funded by everyone from the NOAA and NASA to the US intelligence community. The report concludes that carbon removal from the atmosphere is technically viable, but it's currently too expensive to see widespread use. Altering the amount of sunlight reaching the Earth, however, appears fraught with risks, both practical and political.
The report's authors make one thing clear from the very start: it would be much, much easier to simply limit our carbon emissions now. "There is no substitute for dramatic reductions in the emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases," they write, "to mitigate the negative consequences of climate change, and concurrently to reduce ocean acidification." The report's first recommendation is that we focus on mitigation and adaption efforts, as "these approaches do not present poorly defined and poorly quantified risks and are at a greater state of technological readiness."
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