As the atmosphere continues to fill with greenhouse gases from human activities, many proposals have surfaced to "geoengineer" climate-saving solutions, that is, alter the atmosphere at a global scale to either reduce the concentrations of carbon or mute its warming effect.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/17436050

As the atmosphere continues to fill with greenhouse gases from human activities, many proposals have surfaced to “geoengineer” climate-saving solutions, that is, alter the atmosphere at a global scale to either reduce the concentrations of carbon or mute its warming effect.

“Our work showed that the efficiency of the proposed technology was quite low, meaning widespread adoption of the technology would be required to make any meaningful impact on atmospheric CH4,” said Mayhew, a postdoctoral researcher with the U’s Wilkes Center for Climate Science & Policy. “Then, our results indicate that if this technology is adopted at scale, then we start to see some negative air-quality side effects, particularly for wintertime particulate matter air pollution.”

The study

  • Ben Matthews@sopuli.xyzEnglish
    0·
    11 days ago

    Methane is a big problem, tackling CH4 may be the only fast enough way to reduce peak warming. Also, by using up atmospheric oxisidising capacity, CH4 increases it’s own lifetime (i.e. the more we put in the air, the longer it hangs around) - a problematic positive feedback. First priority of course is to tackle the obvious emissions (especially from fossil installations - many in russia as well as usa) but it’s still worth studying what might be done to reduce atmospheric CH4. Seems this proposal is not an effective solution, but partly a question of time and place .