We Won’t Know If Solar Geoengineering Is Working

In a perfect world, solar geoengineering would be a cheap and easy way to adjust the planet’s temperature. If things are getting too hot, you’d send up airplanes to spray sulfur particles into the upper atmosphere to reflect away sunlight. If the temperature starts dropping too much, you’d ground the planes and allow the sulfur particles to settle out.

But a new study finds that learning-by-doing isn’t such a hot idea when it comes to global warming. Rather than contributing useful information, a bit of solar geoengineering would actually add to the confusion, says a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper by David Kelly of the University of Miami, Garth Heutel of Georgia State University, Juan Moreno-Cruz of the University of Waterloo, and Soheil Shayegh of the RFF-CMCC European Institute on Economics & the Environment.