Solar Geoengineering Research Blog

The Climate Emergency, Intersectional Justice, and the Urgency of Solar Geoengineering Research

By Marissa Saenger

I write this from a smoke-filled Northern California apartment, breathing thick, ashy, overheated air as heat waves shatter records and glaciers collapse against the backdrop of a rapidly changing climate. With emotions and particulates burning in my chest, it feels darkly ironic that my current line of work involves injecting the (computer-simulated) atmosphere with even more...

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Ten Years of GeoMIP

By Ben Kravitz

 

I’m writing this blog from my couch, where I’ve effectively been for the past 3 ½ months in self-quarantine due to COVID-19.  Putting myself in the shoes I was wearing ten years ago, if you asked me in 2010 where I see myself in 2020, I guarantee you that I would have gotten the answer wrong....

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Reflections on a meeting about space-based solar geoengineering

By David Keith, Oliver Morton, Yomay Shyur, Pete Worden, and Robin Wordsworth

The idea that solar geoengineering might make use of space-based devices is not new. While not a common opinion, some have even seen it as preferable to other solar geoenginnering approaches. Mautner and Parks, writing in 1990  [1] claimed that “Climate engineering, which is impractical with...

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Green Moral Hazards

By Gernot Wagner & Daniel Zizzamia

mor·al haz·ard [ˈmôrəl ˈhazərd, noun]

Lack of incentive to guard against risk where one is protected from its consequences.

The formal definition of “moral hazards” applies squarely to insurance. Health insurance is a classic example, and one where moral hazards are pervasive. Equating moral hazards with “moral failings,” they are often used by some on the political right as arguments against government-provided health care.

Environmentalists have their own form of moral hazards, typically applied to new technologies fixing problems without the need for deeper structural and behavioral reforms: band-aid solutions in the form of “technofixes.”... Read more about Green Moral Hazards

Uncovering the Origins of False Claims in the Solar Geoengineering Discourse

By Jesse L. Reynolds

The story behind a recent news article reveals how activist groupswith the media’s helpcause misleading and false assertions to arise, persist, and spread.

Much of my work concerns solar geoengineering, a set of proposals to block or reflect a small portion of incoming sunlight in order to reduce global warming. Unfortunately, the discourse is rife with specious, misrepresented, and outright false statements – many of which are consistent with intuition – that are repeated until they acquire a sheen of quasi-truth...

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The Governance of Solar Geoengineering and Human Rights

By Jesse L. Reynolds

jesse reynolds book

Human rights are often invoked for guiding policy development, especially internationally. Although this occurs in the case of solar geoengineering, it is uncommon to see much beyond a few vague phrases, such as pointing to the need to proceed consistently with human rights. How might human rights help shape the governance of solar geoengineering?

The phrase “human rights” means different things to different people. Here I focus on international human rights law. Countries have made commitments in binding and nonbinding agreements regarding how they will treat their citizens, residents, and others. International human rights law is found primarily in three leading global agreements (the nonbinding Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights) and supplemented by topical agreements concerning the rights of children, women, and persons with disabilities as well as regional conventions.... Read more about The Governance of Solar Geoengineering and Human Rights

Might research on solar geoengineering resemble its broader “free-driver” dynamics?

By Gernot Wagner

It’s called “re-search” for a reason. You search, you search, and you search again. It also means that researchers will naturally tackle the low-hanging fruits first. Unearthing the harder bits just takes time. That’s the natural flow of things, and solar geoengineering research is unlikely to be different.

The broader implications for solar geoengineering and its possible role in climate policy, however, might well be.

Contrast solar geoengineering with cutting emissions in the first place. The Economics 101 analysis of emissions...

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Perspectives on the UNEA resolution

Delegates discussed a draft resolution regarding solar geoengineering and carbon dioxide removal (CDR) at the fourth session of the UN environment assembly (UNEA), which took place from the 11th to 15th of March in Nairobi. The Swiss government put forward the draft resolution with the support of a dozen other countries. The core action proposed by the draft resolution was to “prepare an assessment of the status of geoengineering technologies, in particular,...

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Solar Geoengineering Research Zotero Library

By Lizzie Burns, Amy Chang, Pete Irvine, Nils, Matzner*, Ella Necheles, Jesse Reynolds*, and Gernot Wagner

Ever since Paul Crutzen broke a long-standing taboo on solar geoengineering research with an essay published in Climatic Change in 2006, the number of publications in the field has increased rapidly. By now there are over 1,500.

We have attempted here to collect and catalog them in an easily accessible...

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Does the Fossil Fuel Industry Support Geoengineering?

By Jesse L. Reynolds

A misleading new report from Center for International Environmental Law and the Heinrich Boell Foundation demeans the discourse

Geoengineering is controversial in the climate change community, and understandably so. Proposed interventions like negative emissions technologies (a.k.a. carbon dioxide removal) and solar geoengineering (a.k.a. solar radiation management or SRM) involve large-scale intervention in the climate system that could have adverse physical or social impacts. At the same time, some geoengineering methods could substantially reduce climate change.... Read more about Does the Fossil Fuel Industry Support Geoengineering?

Lessons from human genetic modification

By Jesse L. Reynolds

Before studying the governance of geoengineering, I worked on the governance of human genetic and reproductive technologies. I was thus quite interested, but not too surprised, when reports emerged late Sunday that the first genetically modified babies have been born. It appears that He Jiankui of the Southern University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen, China edited the...

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Funding for Solar Geoengineering from 2008 to 2018

By Ella Necheles, Lizzie Burns, Amy Chang, and David Keith. 

Our Project

As the visibility of solar geoengineering research grows, we thought it would be useful to provide a publicly accessible record of the solar geoengineering projects that have been funded over the past ten years.

How one defines a solar geoengineering “project,” however, is not straightforward. With a diverse range of efforts having taken place, there are numerous approaches that one could take.

For our purposes, we used the following definition to focus our...

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Reflections on the IPCC special report on pathways to and impacts of 1.5°C

By Matthias Honegger

How is this report different from previous IPCC reports?

The main difference to previous reports issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is that this report focuses on the 1.5°C target, while the the Fifth Assessment Report did not pay much attention to it, largely because too few studies even addressed this ambitious scenario. The Paris Agreement and the request to the IPCC for this latest...

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Designer Climates?

By Ben Kravitz

"If geoengineering worked, whose hand would be on the thermostat? How could the world agree on an optimal climate?" – Alan Robock (Science, 2008)

When I first started working on this topic in 2008 as Alan Robock's Ph.D. student, I had no idea how to answer these questions, but I knew they were important. I had seen ...

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Debating Solar Geoengineering on the Kialo Visual Reasoning Platform

By Malini Bose, Festus Ojo, and Dustin Tingley

Solar geoengineering poses many possibilities but comes with a whole range of complex considerations. Debates on the topic, especially online, are often messy and governed by emotions. In this blogpost, we introduce recent work on a visual reasoning platform called Kialo to help represent the multiple considerations in a reasoned way.... Read more about Debating Solar Geoengineering on the Kialo Visual Reasoning Platform

Welcome to the Solar Geoengineering Research blog

By Holly Buck, Pete Irvine, Ben Kravitz, Andy Parker, and Gernot Wagner

Welcome to the Solar Geoengineering Research blog. The goal is simple: provide a platform for solar geoengineering researchers and research. By researchers, for researchers.

We realize, of course, that any blog is necessarily a public forum. That is by design. We hope this blog provides a place for discussion between those interested in the topic, regardless of whether they are researchers, journalists, policy makers, policy talkers, or anyone else interested in the latest interdisciplinary takes on solar geoengineering.... Read more about Welcome to the Solar Geoengineering Research blog