My Climate Change News

World Environment Day 2020: MIT study highlights ill-effects of reflecting sunlight! Global warming is real and it is happening. But how can we tackle this? Some scientists were exploring methods to protect the Earth from a part of the Sun, by sending reflective aerosols into the stratosphere so that they could block the Sun’s heat and reduce global warming. This is known as solar geoengineering. However, a study by scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has now brought to light the reasons why that may not be the best idea, and the ill-effects of such a step.

A team of scientists from MIT have published a paper in the journal Geophysical Research Letters that such schemes would cause a significant change in the extratropical storm tracks, which are the zones in the high and middle latitudes where storms are formed throughout the year, and are then taken across oceans and lands with the help of jet streams. These tracks give rise to extratropical cyclones and not tropical hurricanes. As per a statement by MIT, the strength of these tracks determines the frequency as well as the severity of the storms.

The team of researchers began with an ideal scenario in which the solar sunlight reflected was enough to set off the global warming caused if the concentration of carbon dioxide were to quadruple. Several climate models under this scenario showed that the storm tracks would weaken in both the southern and northern hemispheres. In the northern hemisphere, storm tracks could weaken by as much as 5-7%.While weakened tracks would lead to less powerful winter storms, it would also result in stagnant conditions in summers especially, and lack of wind to clear away air pollution. Moreover, if wind conditions were to change, the circulation of ocean waters would also change and the stability of ice sheets would also be affected.The MIT statement quoted graduate student in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences...