Scientists Call for Ban on Hacking the Earth's Climate With Chemicals or Giant Mirrors

"A strong global governance framework would be needed for this."

Reflection Shows

Government scientists are calling on the European Union to ban massive space mirrors and other forms of solar geoengineering meant to reflect solar radiation and cool the planet below — but not forever.

As the Guardian reports, the European Union's Scientific Advice Mechanism group has issued a call for a moratorium on technologies like cloud brightening, stratospheric aerosol injection, and Sun-reflecting space mirrors, which they say are "highly uncertain" and could ironically end up harming the climate in unforeseen ways.

For solar geoengineering projects to begin reversing climate change, the group's members wrote in their advisory statement, they would need to be deployed at extraordinary scale — and because these technologies are mostly untested, nobody knows what their impact would be.

"A strong global governance framework would be needed for this, with adequate representation for all affected parties, and with compensation mechanisms for those potentially harmed," the statement reads. "No such framework exists, and it is not clear how one could be created."

Critical Advice

That regulatory difficulty was on display earlier this year at a United Nations meeting when a Swiss-led proposal intended to manage solar geoengineering was rejected by a group of African nations. The Swiss ultimately pulled their proposal — but not before the United States and Saudi Arabia moved to block it.

Speaking to the Guardian, Wageningen University environmental governance professor Aarti Gupta said it's "crucially important" that the EU follow its science advisors' counsel and issue a moratorium on solar geoengineering technologies.

As a member of the team that wrote the policy proposal undergirding the SAM's advisory, Gupta said that it's essential for the EU now to "show global leadership in pushing for an international 'non-deployment' regime on [solar geoengineering]."

With all that context, the EU's top science advisors are still suggesting there be carve-outs for research that is "rigorous, ethical and explicit about uncertainties — and includes critical reflection on the full range of direct and indirect effects, governance and justice issues."

More on geoengineering: United States Attempting to Detect Other Countries Tinkering With the Climate