A new study published on the ways to stem global warming and climate change have pointed to only one real solution: reducing carbon emissions.
The researchers suggested that other efforts to reduce climate change, including "giant mirrors in space" aimed at reducing sunlight trapped in the atmosphere are doing too little to slow the current rapid pace of climate change affecting the planet and urged for a concerted push to reduce carbon emissions to reduce climate change's effects on the environment and living circumstances.
Overall, the report looked at the ways in which agencies and other institutions are looking to reduce climate change's effects on the planet and came to the conclusion that only through the reduction of carbon emissions can this help in decreasing the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
"We found that climate engineering doesn't offer a perfect option," said Daniela Cusack, the study's lead author and an assistant professor of geography in the UCLA College. "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 is the first academic report to look at, and rank, the current global approaches to reducing climate change. The researchers delved into costs, risk, public perception, government action and ethics in coming to their conclusions.
The study was published in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, a peer-reviewed journal.
It looked at a number of issues, from macro to micro economic issues as well as the effect climate change will have on food production, climate and water security in the near future.
The study revealed what they believe to be the best strategies in helping to get climate change under control. They looked at the reduction of carbon, but also pointed out that sequestering carbon "through biological means on land and in the ocean" are important, as are storing carbon dioxide in liquid form under the Earth's surface and increasing the planet's cloud cover and solar reflection.
It was also revealed that some seven gigatons of carbon are being released into the atmosphere annually, and this must be reduced in order to better bring about change for climate issues. A gigaton is one billion tons. Slowing or stopping the destruction of forests and promoting growth of new forests could tie up as much as 1.3 gigatons of carbon in plant material annually, the team calculated. Deforestation adds 1 gigaton of carbon each year to the atmosphere.
"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."
