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Scientists comment on new research projects as part of ARIA’s Exploring Climate Cooling programme.
Dr Pete Irvine, Research Assistant Professor, Solar Geoengineering, University of Chicago; and Co-founder of SRM360, said:
“ARIA’s new solar geoengineering research programme is the largest single funding effort to date and will make the UK a world leader in this field. But, this programme should not be seen as a rush to develop and deploy these technologies. ARIA is adopting a measured, staged approach which includes limited, small-scale field experiments which will have to go through environmental impact assessment and public consultation before they are approved. ARIA’s effort doesn’t just focus on field experiments and includes several efforts focused on observing natural processes, modelling the climate response, and exploring the governance implications. ARIA’s broad programme of research will help advance our fundamental understanding of solar geoengineering and help to ensure that policymakers have the information they need to make informed decisions about these ideas in future.”
Prof Stuart Haszeldine, Professor of Carbon Capture and Storage, School of School of GeoSciences, University of Edinburgh, said:
“Humans are losing the battle against climate change. Engineering cooling is necessary because in spite of measurements and meetings and international treaties during the past 70 years, the annual emissions of greenhouse gases have continued to increase. The world is heading towards heating greater than any time in our civilisation.
“Many natural processes are reaching a tipping point, where the earth may jump into a different pattern of behaviour. Geological records of the past 20,000 years around the UK and globally show that rapid changes can happen within a few years and can take tens to hundreds of years to recover.
“Natural processes can cool the climate, notably volcanic eruptions can place tiny rock particles and sulphur gases high into the stratosphere. In the geological and recent past, these have cooled earth temperatures by 1 or 2 degrees C for 2 to 5 years. The scientific understanding of short timescale earth behaviour is not yet good enough to make reliable predictions. So research is needed, together with testing of remedies in the real world not just in laboratories.
“Projects in geo-engineering will be subject to unusually strong and transparent governance. Strong public reactions have resulted from previous investigations. And novel and appropriate communication is especially needed, to explain to citizens in urban and remote communities how and why this work is necessary.
“In a world before satellites and computer models for weather forecasting – the best that humans could do was appeal to the weather gods. Or look out of the window to watch the rainstorm approach. Or the drought continue. Now humans need more information to work out how the climate, not just the imminent weather, can be predicted and managed. Before making big interventions, it’s necessary to make sure the modelling works in controlled experiments. And also to understand who could be winners or losers during global geo-engineering. Ignoring the problem is not an answer to a situation which humans have created.”
Dr Naomi Vaughan, Associate Professor of Climate Change, Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, UEA, said:
Question: Lots of scientists, including many who research SRM, say they don’t want it to ever have to be deployed. Why is that?
“SRM methods do not address the causes of climate change – SRM methods seek to cool the climate by reflecting more sunlight back to space to offset the warming we are causing by increased concentrations of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere that come from the burning of coal, oil and gas and deforestation.
“Deployment is a major issue for SRM ideas, because the way that SRM balances out the warming we’ve caused is not a perfect offset. Deploying SRM would create a new risk to global society – the risk of stopping the SRM whilst greenhouse gas concentrations were still high, as it would cause very rapid warming. To stop SRM once it had been deployed safely, would require global society to reach net zero emissions and pay to remove large amounts of CO2 from the atmosphere.
“It’s for these reasons that many scientists are cautious about SRM research because of how it could be used or misused in the future.”
Dr Phil Williamson, Honorary Associate Professor, UEA, said:
“The ARIA research programme focuses on technical capabilities for five specific cooling approaches. Progress will undoubtedly be made, with one or more indicating that we could abandon net-zero knowing there would be a safety net to avoid climate catastrophe. Yet the most crucial component of the initiative is the one concerning ethics and governance: is there any chance at all that there could ever be international agreement on such action? In our divided world, the answer is no. We would then be faced with the intolerable situation of the global climate being controlled by the most powerful nations (maybe our friends, maybe our foes) with scant regard for worldwide human rights, despite ARIA’s stated concerns regarding “impacts on the Global South”.”
Prof Mike Hulme, Professor of Human Geography, University of Cambridge, said:
“£57m is a huge amount of tax-payers money to be spent on this assortment of speculative technologies intended to manipulate the Earth’s climate. I say this because these technologies will always remain speculative, and unproven in the real world, until they are deployed at scale. Just because they “work” in a model, or at a micro-scale in the lab or the sky, does not mean they will cool climate safely, without unwanted side-effects, in the real world. There is therefore no way that this research can demonstrate that the technologies are safe, successful or reversible. The UK Government is leading the world down what academic analysts call ‘the slippery slope’ towards eventual dangerous large-scale deployment of solar geoengineering technologies. This is public money that would be far better invested in enhancing technologies to reduce dependence on fossil fuels or to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.”
Declared interests
Dr Pete Irvine: “No interests, besides being the co-founder of the non-profit SRM360.org.”
Prof Stuart Haszeldine: “Stuart Haszeldine has no competing interests. His research on climate engineering is not funded by ARIA, or UKRI or commercial companies.”
Dr Naomi Vaughan: “No industry links. I worked on a NERC-funded geoengineering research project, which included SRM, in 2010-2014.”
Dr Phil Williamson: “Formerly employed by Natural Environment Research Council, including as Science Coordinator of UK Greenhouse Gas Removal Programme (2016-2020); now retired, with no external funding. Lead author of two reports (2012, 2016) on Climate Geoengineering for UN Convention on Biological Diversity.”
Prof Mike Hulme: “I am a signatory to the international Solar Geoengineering Non-Use Agreement: https://www.solargeoeng.org/.”