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No global solar-geoengineering program has operated, so these are modeled scenarios rather than observations. The reviewed literature does not provide a credible probability that a hypothetical program would suddenly fail.
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What happens if solar geoengineering stops?
The most discussed intervention for this question is stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI), a proposed form of solar-radiation modification (SRM). SAI would place reflective particles, or chemicals that form them, in the stratosphere. Those particles could reflect a portion of incoming sunlight and create a cooling influence for as long as injections continued.
The particles would not remove carbon dioxide or other greenhouse gases. They would also not reverse every effect of those gases, including ocean acidification. If injections stopped, the aerosols would gradually leave the stratosphere, but the greenhouse forcing would remain. The climate would therefore move toward the warmer trajectory set by accumulated emissions, potentially much faster than it would have warmed without the intervention.
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That does not mean the planet would return precisely to the climate it would have had without geoengineering. Temperature patterns, precipitation, extremes and regional circulation could differ because the atmosphere and oceans would be responding to a different history of forcing. The National Academies’ 2021 report says that offsetting a large amount of warming without stronger emissions cuts creates a risk of “unacceptable” and catastrophically rapid warming if the intervention is terminated.
What is termination shock?
Andrea Parker and colleagues define termination shock as rapid and substantial warming after solar-radiation modification is ceased. The phrase describes a modeled response, not a recorded event. Many studies examine an intentionally stark case in which a large intervention ends instantly and permanently. Other scenarios consider a smaller deployment, a gradual phaseout or an interruption followed by restoration.
An abrupt stop can create a steep temperature change because the climate system has been held below the warming level implied by its greenhouse-gas concentration. The longer and larger the intervention, the greater the potential gap between the managed temperature and the underlying greenhouse-forced state. Once the reflective material declines, that gap can close quickly relative to the pace of warming that would otherwise have occurred.
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Greenhouse gases remain in the atmosphere
SAI changes the amount of sunlight reaching the lower atmosphere; it does not lower atmospheric carbon dioxide, methane or other greenhouse-gas concentrations. Carbon dioxide can persist for centuries, so ending injections would expose the climate to forcing that had accumulated during the program and before it.
Some carbon-dioxide effects are independent of temperature
Ocean acidification is driven by carbon dioxide dissolving into seawater. Cooling the surface with SRM would not remove that chemical change. A program could therefore mask part of the temperature increase while leaving acidification and other greenhouse-gas impacts in place.
Cooling is not a perfect restoration
The National Academies cautions that solar geoengineering cannot reproduce a prior climate state with high fidelity. A global-average temperature target could coexist with altered monsoons, precipitation belts, circulation patterns and extreme events. Stopping the intervention would expose those differences rather than simply switch the climate back to an earlier baseline.
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What determines how severe the outcome is?
There is no single termination-shock result. Four variables dominate comparisons among modeled cases.
| Variable | More severe case | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Amount of cooling supplied | A large intervention offsets a large share of greenhouse warming | A larger hidden temperature gap can emerge when aerosols disappear. The National Academies’ strongest warning concerns offsetting a large amount of warming. |
| Background emissions | Continued high emissions and rising greenhouse-gas concentrations | More forcing remains to be revealed after the cooling influence fades. Lower emissions reduce, but do not automatically eliminate, the gap. |
| How cessation occurs | Instant, permanent termination | The climate receives the largest change in radiative forcing over the shortest period. Gradual phaseout and temporary interruption are different modeled cases. |
| Where impacts occur | Regions or ecosystems exposed to rapid shifts in temperature and precipitation | A modest global-average change can still produce severe local effects, including circulation and monsoon changes. |
These variables interact. For example, a gradual phaseout during declining emissions is not equivalent to an abrupt stop during continued high emissions. Comparing them as if they were the same experiment can make the risk appear either larger or smaller than the evidence supports.
How abrupt, temporary and gradual stops differ
Abrupt and permanent termination
This is the clearest termination-shock scenario: injections stop at once and never resume. Aerosol concentrations decline while greenhouse-gas forcing remains. Parker et al. use such cases to examine rapid warming and its consequences, but the scenario is an analytical stress test rather than a prediction that a particular program will fail this way.
Temporary interruption
An interruption could result in a short-lived loss of cooling followed by restoration. The climate response would depend on how long injections were unavailable, how much aerosol had already dissipated and whether the system could safely resume operations. Restoration does not erase the warming or ecological changes that occurred during the interruption.
Managed phaseout
A phaseout would reduce the intervention over time, allowing the climate to adjust more gradually. It can lower the rate of warming in a model, but it is not a guarantee of safety. A phaseout still leaves greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and real-world constraints could prevent operators from following an ideal schedule.
Could global warming become worse than it would have been?
In the short term, the warming rate after a sudden stop could be greater than the warming rate on an otherwise similar pathway without SRM, because the system would be losing cooling while greenhouse forcing persisted. That is the core meaning of termination shock.
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The comparison must be made carefully. A program that had substantially reduced temperatures for decades would create a different climate history from one that never operated. The post-termination trajectory is not a simple “snap back” to an untouched Earth. Ocean heat uptake, atmospheric circulation, ice, ecosystems and human infrastructure would all reflect the years under intervention.
The National Academies’ conclusion is a risk assessment, not a forecast of a specific year or event. It identifies catastrophically rapid warming as unacceptable when a large amount of warming has been offset without stronger mitigation, because an involuntary termination could force rapid climatic change.
Regional climate effects may matter more than the global average
Global mean temperature is an incomplete measure of termination risk. SRM could cool some regions more than others and alter atmospheric circulation. When the intervention ends, regional temperature and precipitation patterns could shift at different rates.
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The National Academies identifies uncertainty around regional climate, including monsoon behavior. A rapid change in land-sea temperature contrasts or circulation could affect the timing, intensity or location of seasonal rains. The direction and size of a change would vary by region and model; a global average cannot specify whether a particular watershed becomes wetter or drier.
Heat and other extremes
Rapid warming can compress the time available for communities, agriculture and infrastructure to adapt. Changes in extremes need not track the global mean exactly. Some hazards could intensify quickly in particular regions even if the worldwide average changes by a smaller amount.
Uneven exposure
Countries and communities would not share the same ability to monitor, adapt to or recover from a fast shift. Governance decisions about deployment could therefore create obligations to disclose risks, plan for interruption and address harms that cross borders.
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What could happen to ecosystems?
Review literature describes possible ecological damage after sudden termination, but these findings come from models under selected scenarios. A review hosted by the NOAA Central Library repository reports that some models find increased extinction risk for poorly dispersing species, including corals and amphibians.
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Species with narrow temperature or moisture tolerances may be unable to move, reproduce or acclimate as quickly as conditions change. Fragmented habitats can make migration impossible. Coral reefs face the additional pressure of ocean acidification, which SRM would not remove, so a temperature shock would be layered onto an existing chemical stress.
Ecological outcomes would depend on the speed and regional pattern of change, species traits, habitat connectivity and other pressures such as land-use change. The modeled extinction-risk results should not be presented as observations from an operating global program or as a precise count of species that would be lost.
Why might a program stop?
The literature identifies several hypothetical pathways, without assigning reliable probabilities to them:
- Political or governance failure: a governing coalition could dissolve, a treaty could be rejected or states could disagree about continuation.
- Economic collapse: a program could lose the funding, manufacturing capacity or aircraft operations needed for continuous injections.
- War or terrorism: attacks or conflict could disrupt facilities, supply chains or flight operations.
- Natural disasters: a major disaster could make launch sites, aircraft bases or production plants unavailable.
- Discovery of serious side effects: monitoring could reveal harms that lead authorities to order a halt.
Parker et al. note that much earlier work analyzed what termination would do without explaining how it might happen or how likely each pathway was. The absence of a probability estimate is important: the sources support scenario analysis, not a numerical forecast of failure.
What would a resilient program need to plan for?
Any proposal involving long-term SRM would have to treat continuity and termination as central design problems rather than afterthoughts. Unresolved questions include:
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- Who has authority to deploy, alter or stop injections?
- Who pays for decades of monitoring, aircraft, materials and emergency operations?
- What technical reserves and international agreements would keep an interruption from becoming permanent?
- What observations would trigger a pause, reduction or restart?
- How would affected communities participate in decisions and receive warning?
- Who compensates people or countries that experience serious harm?
The NOAA-hosted review identifies these governance and liability issues as unresolved. UNEP’s 2023 expert panel likewise highlights uncertainty, governance, finance, equity and consent. Continuity planning could reduce some interruption risks, but it cannot guarantee that a worldwide political system would remain stable for as long as the intervention was needed.
What the evidence can—and cannot—say
What is supported
- Termination shock is a plausible modeled consequence of abruptly ending a large SRM intervention.
- The underlying greenhouse-gas forcing would remain because SAI does not remove greenhouse gases.
- Climate patterns, regional rainfall and ecosystems could change rapidly in some scenarios.
- Gradual phaseout and temporary interruption produce different outcomes from an abrupt permanent stop.
What is not established
- No global SAI deployment has generated observational evidence of a termination shock.
- The reviewed sources do not provide one universal numerical temperature rebound.
- They do not establish a credible probability that a program would suddenly terminate.
- A model result for one emissions pathway, intervention size or region cannot be generalized to every possible design.
UNEP Chief Scientist Andrea Hinwood said in 2023: “There’s been a great deal of headway in SRM research and important advances in modeling, but we need far more empirical evidence on the risks and potential consequences before exposing our only atmosphere to SRM technologies.” The statement captures why model results inform risk management without serving as a forecast of a specific future event.
Does termination risk change the case for emissions cuts?
Yes. The possibility of termination shock is one reason the National Academies and UNEP describe SRM as no substitute for reducing greenhouse-gas emissions. Cutting emissions addresses the forcing that creates long-term warming and ocean acidification. SRM would, at most, offset part of the temperature effect temporarily while adding its own environmental, technical and governance risks.
If emissions remain high, a larger intervention would be needed to maintain a target temperature, and a future failure could reveal a larger hidden warming gap. Stronger mitigation narrows that gap and reduces dependence on continuous injections, although it does not make every SRM scenario risk-free.
How to evaluate claims about a sudden stop
- Identify the intervention. Check whether the claim concerns SAI or another SRM method; different techniques do not have identical effects.
- Check the scenario size. Find out how much cooling is assumed and how long it has operated.
- Check the emissions pathway. Continued high emissions and falling emissions imply different underlying forcing.
- Check the stopping rule. An instantaneous permanent stop should not be compared directly with a gradual phaseout.
- Separate global and regional results. A global-average temperature number does not describe monsoons, drought, heat or ecosystem exposure in a particular place.
- Look for uncertainty and source date. Modeling results are conditional; institutional assessments such as the National Academies’ 2021 report and UNEP’s 2023 and 2026 materials state the limits of current evidence.
The practical bottom line
A sudden end to a large solar-geoengineering program could produce rapid warming because the cooling influence would disappear while greenhouse gases remained. The greatest modeled danger occurs when a large amount of warming has been masked, emissions stay high and cessation is abrupt and permanent. Regional climate shifts and ecological damage could accompany the temperature change.
That conclusion is a warning about dependence on a temporary intervention, not a prediction that termination will occur or a quantified estimate of its probability. The absence of an operating global program means evidence remains model-based. Any serious discussion must therefore pair termination planning and international governance with the central measure that reduces the underlying risk: sustained greenhouse-gas emissions cuts.
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