Report: Geoengineering Plans Must Account for Ecosystem Impacts

As geoengineering planning becomes widespread, researchers note that little thought has been given to its potential effects on ecosystems. Scientists attempting to understand the potential effects of human geoengineering efforts often must rely on similar natural events to reach conclusions. The 1991 eruption of Mt. Pinatubo in the Philippines ejected 15 million tons of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere, enough to cause cooling on a global scale as the particles caused greater reflection of solar energy away from Earth's surface toward space. Photo: USGS Margaret Leinen recalls that when Nobel Prize-winning physicist Paul Crutzen wrote a 2006 essay exploring the feasibility of geoengineering, the late Stanford climatologist Stephen Schneider noted that in Crutzen, "the messenger was the message." After years of speculative musings about the efficacy of geoengineering, mostly taking place on the fringes of science, it took the gravitas of the Nobel laureate to legitimize the concept of altering nature to mitigate catastrophes caused by global warming. "It's gone way beyond that," said Leinen, executive director of the Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institution in Florida. "Now, you've got governments talking about it, and that's pretty serious." Strategies to mitigate climate change by artificial means usually propose doing so either by making Earth brighter and, therefore, cooler or by removing human-generated carbon dioxide emissions by accelerating photosynthesis.