Press release: https://news.iu.edu/live/news/32667-climate-engineering-could-slow-antarctic-ice-loss
Paper: https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2023JD039434 Short summary… the effects of SAI on risks associated with Antarctic depend on how much cooling you do (duh…) and on the latitude(s) of injection, with SH injection helping and NH injection potentially making things worse. Abstract: Owing to increasing greenhouse gas emissions, the Antarctic Ice Sheet is vulnerable to rapid ice loss in the upcoming decades and centuries. This study examines the effectiveness of using stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI) that minimizes global mean temperature (GMT) change to slow projected 21st century Antarctic ice loss. We simulate 11 different SAI cases which vary by the latitudinal location(s) and the amount(s) of the injection(s) to examine the climatic response near Antarctica in each case as compared to the reference climate at the turn of the last century. We demonstrate that injecting at a single latitude in the northern hemisphere or at the Equator increases Antarctic shelf ocean temperatures pertinent to ice shelf basal melt, while injecting only in the southern hemisphere minimizes this temperature change. We use these results to analyze the results of more complex multi-latitude injection strategies that maintain GMT at or below 1.5°C above the pre-industrial. All these multi-latitude cases will slow Antarctic ice loss relative to the mid-to-late 21st century SSP2-4.5 emissions pathway. Yet, to avoid a GMT threshold estimated by previous studies pertaining to rapid West Antarctic ice loss (1.5°C above the pre-industrial GMT, though large uncertainty), our study suggests SAI would need to cool about 1.0°C below this threshold and predominately inject at low southern hemisphere latitudes (∼15°S - 30°S). These results highlight the complexity of factors impacting the Antarctic response to SAI and the critical role of the injection strategy in preventing future ice loss. Douglas MacMartin Associate Professor, Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, and Faculty Fellow, Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future Cornell University (650) 619-9341 [email protected] https://climate-engineering.mae.cornell.edu/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "geoengineering" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/geoengineering/CALaO3y_s2QXZZm5_acr12bb7z0T8ZTUyoCFXvj18%2BAPEH7zmcg%40mail.gmail.com.
