Rising global temperatures pose significant risks to marine ecosystems, biodiversity and fisheries. Recent comprehensive assessments suggest that large-scale mitigation efforts to limit warming below crucial thresholds are falling short, and all feasible future climate projections, including those that represent ideal emissions reductions, exceed the Paris Agreement’s aspirational <1.5{degree sign}C warming target, at least temporarily. As such, there are a number of proposed climate interventions that aim to deliberately manipulate the environment at large scales to counteract anthropogenic global warming. Yet, there is a high level of uncertainty in how marine ecosystems will respond to these interventions directly as well as how these interventions may impact marine ecosystems’ responses to climate change. Due to the key role the ocean plays in regulating Earth’s climate and ensuring global food security, understanding the effects that these interventions may have on marine ecosystems is crucial. This review provides an overview of proposed intervention methodologies for solar radiation modification and marine carbon dioxide removal and outlines the potential trade-offs and knowledge gaps associated with their impacts on marine ecosystems. Climate interventions have the potential to reduce warming-driven impacts, but could also substantially alter marine food systems, biodiversity and ecosystem function. Impact assessments are thus crucial to quantify trade-offs between plausible intervention scenarios and to identify and discontinue scaling efforts or commercial implementation for those with unacceptable risks.

Owing to increasing greenhouse gas emissions, the West Antarctic Ice Sheet as well as a few subglacial basins in East Antarctica are vulnerable to rapid ice loss in the upcoming decades and centuries, respectively. 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 use eleven 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 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), our study suggests SAI would need to cool below this threshold and predominately inject at low southern hemisphere latitudes. 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.

Earth System Models (ESMs) are essential for understanding the interaction between human activities and the Earth's climate. However, the computational demands of ESMs often limit the number of simulations that can be run, hindering the robust analysis of risks associated with extreme weather events. While low-cost climate emulators have emerged as an alternative to emulate ESMs and enable rapid analysis of future climate, many of these emulators only provide output on at most a monthly frequency. This temporal resolution is insufficient for analyzing events that require daily characterization, such as heat waves or heavy precipitation. We propose using diffusion models, a class of generative deep learning models, to effectively downscale ESM output from a monthly to a daily frequency. Trained on a handful of ESM realizations, reflecting a wide range of radiative forcings, our DiffESM model takes monthly mean precipitation or temperature as input, and is capable of producing daily values with statistical characteristics close to ESM output. Combined with a low-cost emulator providing monthly means, this approach requires only a small fraction of the computational resources needed to run a large ensemble. We evaluate model behavior using a number of extreme metrics, showing that DiffESM closely matches the spatio-temporal behavior of the ESM output it emulates in terms of the frequency and spatial characteristics of phenomena such as heat waves, dry spells, or rainfall intensity.

The impacts of Stratospheric Aerosol Injection (SAI) on the atmosphere and surface climate depend on when and where the sulfate aerosol precursors are injected, as well as on how much surface cooling is to be achieved. We use a set of CESM2(WACCM6) SAI simulations achieving three different levels of global mean surface cooling and demonstrate that unlike some direct surface climate impacts driven by the reflection of solar radiation by sulfate aerosols, the SAI-induced changes in the high latitude circulation and ozone are more complex and could be non-linear. This manifests in our simulations by disproportionally larger Antarctic springtime ozone loss, significantly larger intra-ensemble spread of the Arctic stratospheric jet and ozone responses, and non-linear impacts on the extratropical modes of surface climate variability under the strongest-cooling SAI scenario compared to the weakest one. These potential non-linearities may add to uncertainties in projections of regional surface impacts under SAI.

Previous modeling studies indicate that even though marine cloud brightening under a susceptibility-based strategy is effective in reducing the global average surface temperature, it triggers a La Niña-like sea-surface temperature response with cooling mostly confined within lower latitudes. Here we explore a different cloud seeding strategy involving seeding of regions with low susceptibility. Simulations with the Community Earth System Model, version 2 (CESM2) reveal that because the regional forcing is weaker and more widespread, cooling is more evenly distributed over the globe. This new strategy also does not result in the La Niña-like state seen in the other strategies.

The efficiency of marine cloud brightening in cooling Earth’s surface temperature is investigated by using a medium ensemble of simulations with the Community Earth System Model version 2 (CESM2). Various cloud seeding schemes based on susceptibility are examined to determine what area extent will be required to induce 1oC cooling under SSP2-4.5. The results indicate that cloud seeding over 5% of the ocean area is capable of achieving this goal. Under this seeding scheme, cloud seeding is mainly deployed over lower latitudes where strong surface temperature and precipitation responses are induced. The simulations also reveal that the 5% cloud seeding scheme induces an overall reduction in global precipitation, with an increase over land and a decrease over the ocean.

Feedback control algorithms, an important tool in climate intervention strategy design, are widely used in stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI) simulations but have never been implemented for marine cloud brightening (MCB). Using the Community Earth System Model (CESM2), we present the first simulations of feedback control-regulated MCB. Our controller, which regulates global mean temperature (T0) by varying the area of MCB coverage over time, successfully maintains the desired T0 of 1.5°C above the preindustrial in the SSP2-4.5 global warming scenario comparably to a contemporary SAI controller. After 35 years of intervention, the surface temperature response when MCB has been gradually ramped up over time in this way is similar to a constant intervention with similar global mean temperature (including strong regional heterogeneity), but system memory may cause differences in Arctic sea ice and the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC).

The specifics of the simulated injection choices in the case of Stratospheric Aerosol Injections (SAI) are part of the crucial context necessary for meaningfully discussing the impacts that a deployment of SAI would have on the planet. One of the main choices is the desired amount of cooling that the injections are aiming to achieve. Previous SAI simulations have usually either simulated a fixed amount of injection, resulting in a fixed amount of warming being offset, or have specified one target temperature, so that the amount of cooling is only dependent on the underlying trajectory of greenhouse gases. Here, we use three sets of SAI simulations achieving different amounts of global mean surface cooling while following a middle-of-the-road greenhouse gas emission trajectory: one SAI scenario maintains temperatures at 1.5ºC above preindustrial levels (PI), and two other scenarios which achieve additional cooling to 1.0ºC and 0.5ºC above PI. We demonstrate that various surface impacts scale proportionally with respect to the amount of cooling, such as global mean precipitation changes, changes to the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) and to the Walker Cell. We also highlight the importance of the choice of the baseline period when comparing the SAI responses to one another and to the greenhouse gas emission pathway. This analysis leads to policy-relevant discussions around the concept of a reference period altogether, and to what constitutes a relevant, or significant, change produced by SAI.

During the last four decades, global warming has intensified extreme precipitation events in the Midwestern United States (defined here as the region covering Illinois, Indiana, Ohio and Kentucky), leading to increased risks to human life, property, and infrastructure. To enable climate change adaptation and resilience across various economic and social sectors in this region, updated information about future climate changes, specifically at finer spatial scales, is essential. Leveraging a new 150-year dynamical downscaling dataset at convection-permitting resolution, this study introduces a framework to construct the projected future intensity-duration-frequency (IDF) curves of heavy precipitation, which are prominent tools for infrastructure design and water resources management. This framework generates IDF curves at both sub-daily and multi-day duration utilizing hourly in situ observations as well as quantile-based statistical techniques in bias-correction and return levels selection. The assumption of non-stationarity in the distribution parameter fitting process is also implemented in this workflow. Compared to historical IDF curves for 1980-2022, future projected IDF curves for 2058-2100 under Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) 4.5 and RCP 8.5 scenarios indicate an average intensity increase of approximately 20% and 30%, respectively, across 74 stations and all four seasons of interest. The frequency of future extreme precipitation events in the Midwest region is also projected to double. Furthermore, current results reveal spatial heterogeneity of future trends across stations owing to the high-resolution input dataset.

By injecting SO2 into the stratosphere at four latitudes (30°, 15° N/S), it might be possible not only to reduce global mean surface temperature but also to minimize changes in the equator-to-pole and inter-hemispheric gradients of temperature, further reducing some of the impacts arising from climate change relative to equatorial injection. This can happen only if the aerosols are transported to higher latitudes by the stratospheric circulation, ensuring that a greater part of the solar radiation is reflected back to space at higher latitudes, compensating for the reduced sunlight. However, the stratospheric heating produced by these aerosols modifies the circulation and strengthens the stratospheric polar vortex which acts as a barrier to the transport of air toward the poles. We show how the heating results in a feedback where increasing injection rates lead to stronger high-latitudinal transport barriers. This implies a potential limitation in the high-latitude aerosol burden and subsequent cooling.

Stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI) can provide global cooling by adding aerosols to the lower stratosphere, and thus is considered as a possible supplement to emission reduction. Previous studies have shown that injecting aerosols at different latitude(s) and season(s) can lead to differences in regional surface climate, and there are at least three independent degrees of freedom (DOF) that can be used to simultaneously manage three different climate goals. To understand the fundamental limits of how well SAI might compensate for anthropogenic climate change, we need to know the possible surface climate responses to SAI by evaluating the SAI design space. This research work quantifies the number of meaningfully-independent DOFs of the SAI design space. This number of meaningfully-independent DOF depends on both the climate metrics that we care about and the amount of cooling. From the available simulation data of different SAI strategies, we observe that between surface air temperature and precipitation, surface air temperature dominates the change of surface climate. The number of injection choices that produce detectably different surface temperature is more than the number of injection choices that produce detectably different precipitation. At low levels of cooling, only a small set of injection choices yield detectably different surface climate responses. As more cooling is needed, more injection choices produce detectably different surface climate. For a cooling level of 1-2C, we find that there are likely between 6 and 12 DOFs. This reveals new opportunities for exploring alternate SAI designs with different distributions of climate impacts and evaluating the underlying trade-offs between different climate goals.

Deliberately blocking out a small portion of the incoming solar radiation would cool the climate. One such approach would be injecting SO$_2$ into the stratosphere, which would produce sulfate aerosols that would remain in the atmosphere for 1–3 years, reflecting part of the incoming shortwave radiation. This would not affect the climate the same way as increased greenhouse gas (GHG) concentrations, leading to residual differences when a GHG increase is offset by stratospheric sulfate geoengineering. Many climate model simulations of geoengineering have used a uniform reduction of the incoming solar radiation as a proxy for stratospheric aerosols, both because many models are not designed to adequately capture relevant stratospheric aerosol processes, and because a solar reduction has often been assumed to capture the most important differences between how stratospheric aerosols and GHG would affect the climate. Here we show that dimming the sun does not produce the same surface climate effects as simulating aerosols in the stratosphere. By more closely matching the spatial pattern of solar reduction to that of the aerosols, some improvements in this idealized representation are possible, with further improvements if the stratospheric heating produced by the aerosols is included. This is relevant both for our understanding of the physical mechanisms driving the changes observed in stratospheric sulfate geoengineering simulations, and in terms of the relevance of impact assessments that use a uniform solar dimming.