Articles by

Ray Pierrehumbert and Michael Mann

Some say we can ‘solar-engineer’ ourselves out of the climate crisis. Don’t buy it

By

Ray Pierrehumbert and Michael Mann

So-called “solar geoengineering” doesn’t actually modify the sun itself. Instead, it reduces incoming sunlight by other means, such as putting chemicals in the atmosphere that reflect sunlight to space. It addresses a symptom of global heating, rather than the root cause, which is human-caused increase in the atmosphere’s burden of carbon dioxide.