Is global warming irreversible?
Almost certainly yes, according to a recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
While some gases contributing to global warming, like methane and nitrous oxide, will disappear if we cut back on emissions, carbon dioxide (CO2), the most prominent of greenhouse gases, will not go away.
“People have imagined that if we stopped emitting carbon dioxide that the climate would go back to normal in 100 years or 200 years. What we’re showing here is that’s not right. It’s essentially an irreversible change that will last for more than a thousand years,” says Susan Solomon, the study’s author and leading climatologist, in an NPR News article.
The earth will still feel the effects of global warming even if carbon emissions are cut way back, human behavior becomes more sustainable and alternative energies technologies are implemented across the board.
The NPR News article goes on to explain regarding Solomon and her team’s findings
This is because the oceans are currently soaking up a lot of the planet’s excess heat — and a lot of the carbon dioxide put into the air. The carbon dioxide and heat will eventually start coming out of the ocean. And that will take place for many hundreds of years.
Solomon is a scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Her new study looked at the consequences of this long-term effect in terms of sea level rise and drought.
If we continue with business as usual for even a few more decades, she says, those emissions could be enough to create permanent dust-bowl conditions in the U.S. Southwest and around the Mediterranean.
If global warming is irreversible, then perhaps geoengineering schemes will enter the scientific discourse regarding global warming, and might even shed the label of “sci-fi” science and become more realistic options.
Much more research needs to be done about proactively engineering the climate to counteract the effects of global warming, but, with this latest report, there could be a major shift in our approach to grappling with global warming — and geoengineering could figure largely in that new approach.
Isn’t the question here one of scale? If we do nothing, the climate change machine accelerates, leading to dire impacts on human life. Any reduction in this rate of change would be better than that, and give us more time to figure how how to deal with effects. I worry that geoengineering will try to create change too quickly, and if it creates negative consequences, we’ll have done irreparable harm.