Tinkering with climate change through climate engineering isn't going to help us get around what we have to do says a new report authored by researchers at six universities, including Simon Fraser University.
After evaluating a range of possible climate-altering approaches to dissipating greenhouse gases and reducing warming, the interdisciplinary team concluded there's no way around it. We have to reduce the amount of carbon being released into the atmosphere.
"Some climate engineering strategies look very cheap on paper. But when you consider other criteria, like ecological risk, public perceptions and the abilities of governments to control the technology, some options look very bad," says Jonn Axsen.
The assistant professor in SFU's School of Resource and Environmental Management is a co-author on this study, which appears in the latest issue of the peer-reviewed journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment. It is 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.
It states reducing emissions, through some combination of switching away from fossil fuels to low-carbon energy sources, improving energy efficiency, and changing human behaviour, is still the most effective way of confronting climate change.
The authors note though that some approaches to climate engineering are more promising than others, and they should be used to augment efforts to reduce the climate-change effects resulting from human activity.
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