Source: AGU Advances
Editors’ Highlights are summaries of recent papers by AGU’s journal editors.
Climate change is a grand challenge of the 21st century. While not a substitute for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, solar geoengineering (SG) that includes injecting aerosols into the stratosphere to reflect sunlight has been proposed as a controversial strategy for responding to climate change. Among the concerns are the unknown risks, uncertainties, and unintended impacts of SG. Moch et al. [2023] reveal an overlooked atmospheric chemical feedback from stratospheric aerosol injection. They show that the stratospheric ozone depletion from SG increases the flux of certain UV radiation that, in turn, changes tropospheric atmospheric composition. As a consequence, this chemical feedback influences the spatial patterns of radiative forcing, which leads to warming in some regions and cooling in other regions, raising the concerns about global equity. This underscores the importance of deepening our understanding of SG and warns us about its potential unforeseen consequences.
Citation: Moch, J. M., Mickley, L. J., Eastham, S. D., Lundgren, E. W., Shah, V., Buonocore, J. J., et al. [2023]. Overlooked long-term atmospheric chemical feedbacks alter the impact of solar geoengineering: Implications for tropospheric oxidative capacity. AGU Advances, 4, e2023AV000911. https://doi.org/10.1029/2023AV000911
—Hang Su, Editor, AGU Advances