Fossil Fuel Industry's Favorite Climate Solution Risks Malaria Surge, Study Says

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A new study warns that attempting to fight the climate crisis using geoengineering could potentially expose a billion additional people to malaria.

He continued:

First, solar geoengineering doesn’t perfectly turn back the clock on Earth’s climate. Even if you add enough sulfate aerosols to perfectly counteract the amount of warming from carbon pollution, you’re still changing the climate’s physics, not restoring what once was. Many geoengineering simulations produce strange phenomena, such as ‘tropical overcooling,’ wherein land near the equator is cooler than you would expect, even while territory near the poles remains much hotter.

And that’s a problem, because malaria does not have a linear relationship with temperature. The malaria parasite is spread by mosquitoes, which are cold-blooded and depend on the ambient air temperature to set the pace of their metabolism; malaria risk, then, tends to increase as the temperature gets hotter. It peaks at an average of 25 degrees Celsius, or 77 degrees Fahrenheit…

The study found that tropical overcooling and the ideal temperature for malaria transmission can interact in troubling ways. In some parts of the world, geoengineering took a place that would have been too hot to allow mosquito survival and brought it back into a survivable range. In others, it restored the close-to-25-degree-Celsius temperatures that mosquitoes need to thrive.

Carlson argued that the findings should prompt a closer examination of the unforeseen ripple effects of geoengineering methods, particularly as governments look to such schemes as

 

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Geoengineering toxic pollution has been going on for a long time. See the science -

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