Wednesday, September 3, 2025

We’ll Need Solar not just Carbon Geoengineering to Stop Global Warming

by Ira Straus

 

Increased outward reflection of sunlight, or what is called "Solar Radiation Modification" (SRM) and “Solar Geoengineering”, is essential for stopping global warming in the near-to-medium term and heading off the growing damages from it. SRM would in fact give carbon reductions time to

proceed finally on a workable schedule.

Carbon emissions reductions are often misleadingly described in as the only thing that can be done about the problem. This leads the proposals for reductions to grow often quite extreme, yet, even then, they remain inherently inadequate as the sole response to the dangers of warning.

Solar geoengineering, unlike carbon reductions alone, has a good chance of working to stop the warming in a short enough span of time. This makes it the precondition for success with carbon reductions. It would meanwhile reduce the collateral damage to the economy and society from anti-warming policy.

Carbon emissions reductions will continue to be needed, alongside SRM, for an enduring solution. But reductions can help significantly only in a longer term. This is the case even when they are supplemented by a still longer-term method – carbon geoengineering, or sucking carbon out of the atmosphere and storing it underground (CCS) – and studies indicate inherent limits to CCS. By itself, furthermore, carbon management could not stop the warming from continuing to worsen for decades – the sum of the time lapses it will require to get through a series of intervening steps needed for stopping the warming itself not just the increases in atmospheric carbon – even if it were able to stop it after that.

This makes SRM essential for the short-medium term, when it alone could dial back the global thermostat in real time; and probably for the long term as well.

 

Warming has been perpetuated by obstruction of Solar Radiation Management

Dangerously, there has been obstruction of research, discussion, and planning on SRM. It has not been sufficiently researched to know how optimally to do it, nor even to be sure it can be done well and safely.

Research has been long delayed out of unawareness, and too often actively suppressed out of ideology. This has led to a bitter cycle of policy failures, one that has:

A.    Added to the damages to the world from warming.

B.     Added to the hasty expenses being demanded for an emissions-reductions-only approach.

C.     Led to increased reactions against what is being done against emissions, instead of leading to solutions supplementary to that.

We should not put the matter too finely. On one side, some people believe their society should pay very heavy costs for overcoming global warming, almost as a form of penance for the sins of society; they have emphasized both extreme projections and extremely costly policy responses. On the other side, some people, suspicious of the first group as sensationalist and not entirely well-intentioned toward their society, turn to denial of the problem of global warming.

These two extremes are the voices most often heard. They get trapped in their mutual polemics, at the expense of considering what is needed.

 

Can we break out of the vicious circle in the warming debate?

More and better research and development on sunlight reflection – SRM – is something that has come to be urgently needed. It is, in fact, the only thing that could turn the present global program of carbon reductions into a realistic solution for global warming. It would do so by supplementing its long-term usefulness with means also for managing the near-medium term risks.

By failing to face this reality, Western discussion has landed in a deadly cycle of denials and unrealisms:

 

1.     First move: A “believers” side shows, mostly accurately, a catastrophic climate danger. It demands increasingly costly measures against the danger, yet inherently insufficient ones. It refuses on ideological grounds to allow urgent research on the only measure – SRM – that could potentially render its preferred anti-carbon method work. Instead it just calls for ratcheting up that method still higher.

A “skeptics” side rejects this believers’ program as both extreme and irrelevant, and often denies the danger itself. It often wins politically, in face of the costs of the believers’ program and its seemingly insuperable inadequacy.

2.     Second move: The believers call the skeptics “deniers” and blame them for the problem. By insisting simply on their policy as what “has to be done”, they blind themselves to their own denial of what is needed for a realistic and adequate policy.

The skeptics call the believers sensationalists and their projections a “hoax”. They blind themselves to the basic truth of those projections, and to the likelihood that the reality is still worse than what can be projected.

Reason is squeezed out by the symbiotic blind spots on both sides. A feeling of helplessness grows – justifiably so, given the constriction of discussion.

3., 4., 5. … Subsequent moves: The cycle repeats itself, at a ratcheted-up level each time: in worsened conditions, after sustaining greater damages, with heightened dangers, and with greater irrationalities on both sides.

We have been going around this circle for more than half a century. It is a truly vicious circle. It ensures that the dangers from the warming will continue worsening, and that the damages will keep rising to ever more catastrophic levels. We need to break out of it.

 

The Way Out

To get out of the cycle of helplessness, we must enlarge the discussion and start talking about real solutions, beginning with SRM. Carbon reduction would continue alongside this. Its continuation would be on a more sustainable schedule, and with fewer of the oscillations between extreme demands for it and extreme denials and cancellations of efforts on it.

There have been sprouts shooting up of this larger discussion. They give reason for moving the discussion forward with renewed confidence today.


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