LCSSP Climate Solutions Seminar

Abstract: Climate change is a serious and urgent global problem, with severe and growing impacts for people and ecosystems worldwide. Given significant concerns about mounting climate impacts, "climate intervention" strategies have gained increasing attention as a potential supplement to mitigation and adaptation efforts. This talk focuses on solar climate intervention, or "solar geoengineering," which would seek to offset climate warming by reflecting a small proportion of incoming solar radiation back into space. Research on solar geoengineering has centered on two approaches – marine cloud brightening, aimed at increasing the reflectivity of low-lying clouds over the ocean, and stratospheric aerosol injection, which would release reflective aerosols into the stratosphere. Even early research, primarily involving computer modeling, on these topics has provoked significant debate, and proposed, small-scale field experiments have been especially controversial. Risk and uncertainty are critical and thorny issues in relation to solar geoengineering, given the complexity of the climate system as well as social, ethical, political, and governance challenges. This talk explores multiple ways of conceptualizing, assessing and managing risk in geoengineering research and development, considering the wide range of risks and uncertainties involved. I argue that iterative, inclusive, and anticipatory approaches to managing risk may enable solar geoengineering research to generate important insights while reducing risks of slippery slopes, premature lock-in, or reckless deployment of these technologies.