A new report suggests using mirrors to reduce the amount of sunlight that is trapped in the Earth's atmosphere and other similar strategies won't work.
"We found that climate engineering doesn't offer a perfect option," Daniela Cusack, the study's lead author and an assistant professor of geography in the UCLA College, said in a UCLA news release. "The perfect option is reducing emissions. We have to cut down the amount of emissions we're putting into the atmosphere if, in the future, we want to have anything like the Earth we have now."
The study did show that that some climate engineering approaches were better than others. The researchers ranked these approaches by their "feasibility, cost-effectiveness, risk, public acceptance, governability and ethics," the news release reported.
The researchers hope the report will help influence policy-makers in making choices in climate change prevention.
The team identified the actions that had the most potential: "reducing emissions, sequestering carbon through biological means on land and in the ocean, storing carbon dioxide in a liquefied form in underground geological formations and wells, increasing the Earth's cloud cover and solar reflection," the news release reported.
Even those these actions held promise, the benefits were miniscule compared with conservation.
"We have the technology, and we know how to do it," Cusack said. "It's just that there doesn't seem to be political support for reducing emissions."
Out of the top strategies converting atmospheric carbon into a solid source is believed to be the most promising.
Cutting down on forest destruction and planting new forests could trap as much as 1.3 gigatons of carbon into plants. Deforestation is believed to be responsible for one gigaton of carbon every year.
Improving soil management could help trap plant material that has already converted carbon dioxide into its solid form.
"Improved soil management is not very controversial," Cusack said. "It's just a matter of supporting farmers to do it."
