Top scientists warn of 'termination shock' in
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- Raymond Pierrehumbert, Julia Slingo, Michael Mann, and Valerie Masson-Delmotte jointly warn that stopping solar geoengineering would unleash a catastrophic 'termination shock,' because CO2 persists for millennia while aerosol interventions decay within years.
- Building the infrastructure for solar geoengineering would take up to two decades, after which societies would be completely reliant on maintaining it indefinitely — a tall task in a world prone to global conflict.
- The UK's £60m Aria geoengineering programme is focused on technology development rather than the scientific foundations needed to assess risks, and many of its projects are pursued in collaboration with for-profit companies.
- Stardust, an Israeli-US startup, has raised more than $60m in venture capital and its business model explicitly assumes near-term solar geoengineering deployment.
- Existing climate models show dramatic disagreement on outcomes — for the same stratospheric aerosol injection, global cooling after 10 years could range anywhere from less than 10°C to as much as 30°C.
- The UK Royal Society, US National Academy, and French Academy of Sciences have all issued assessments urging great caution, yet funding continues to flow toward deployment technology rather than rigorous risk research.
Why it matters: More than £60m in UK government funding and over $60m in private venture capital are already flowing toward solar geoengineering deployment rather than the scientific risk assessment the authors say is required. Because CO2 persists for millennia while aerosol interventions decay within years, any interruption in deployment would release accumulated warming catastrophically fast — locking future generations into perpetual maintenance of an unproven technology.
