Pros of using climate change engineering · Effective · Scale · Can mimic natural processes · Mobile · Job creation.
3 Advantages of Geoengineering · 1. It aims to actively reverse climate damage. When it comes to climate change, methods like emissions reduction
One important concern is that if research indicates that one or more of the CE techniques are capable of producing sufficient global cooling to offset
This manuscript provides an overview of several aspects of climate engineering, including its definition, its potential impacts and risk, and its governance
KEITH: I think one thing that Clive does, and did here, is attempt to say that people advocating research in this technology like me are doing it as a way to avoid the social change we need. I think Clive needs to take seriously the fact that most of the people working on this actually are very serious about the social changes needed, and we may still be wrong to advocate it, but Clive needs to take us on on the reasons we’re wrong, not on a kind of ad hominem attack that we really just like techno fixes and want to as he said in his book “mollify the owners of the fossil fuel infrastructure”. HAMILTON: Well, one of the fascinating things about this push for research into geoengineering, particularly, sulfate aerosol spraying, is that we’ve seen a number of conservative think tanks in Washington like the American Enterprise Institute and the Cato Institute, which for years have been denying that climate change exists, have now come out in favor of sulfate aerosol spraying.
This method of geoengineering has benefits and drawbacks – on the one hand, it is easily and quickly implemented and potentially very effective, but on the other hand, it has the potential risk of affecting weather patterns and as a result evoke droughts, flooding, and catastrophic crop failures (How artificially brightened clouds could stop climate change, 2019). Additionally, stratospheric aerosol injection “differs from GHG mitigation (emission reduction and CO2 removal) in two key ways: (i) its direct deployment costs are potentially lower; (ii) its effects are potentially rapid and large, and as all other geoengineering technologies, it does not treat the root cause of climate change: the concentration of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere ” (Honegger, Michaelowa and Ran, 2021). However, while geoengineering has the potential to stop the immediate most severe impacts of climate change, there are also substantial risks associated with this technology, such as increased acidification, effects on regional climates, depletion of the ozone layer, and more acid depletion.
Our paper, *Impact of solar geoengineering on temperature-attributable mortality*, is a first effort to provide a quantitative risk-risk comparison for any solar geoengineering method. David was part of prior collaboration with Gabe Vecchi which produced an important estimate of solar geoengineering’s potential to reduce regional climate hazards. * Many groups have called for risk-risk analysis of solar geoengineering including the National Academy, NASEM 2021, The Carnegie Climate Governance Initiative, C2G and the call-for-balanceletter with Peter Singer, James Hansen, and Bjorn Stevens, as signatories, see paper. * The air pollution mortality estimate by Eastham combines the direct impacts of injected aerosol that makes it to the surface with climate-mediate changes in the amount of surface ozone and particulate air pollution produced from given industrial emissions. While not comprehensive, these are important risk pathways: temperature-attributable mortality may account for more than half of the monetized harms of climate change, and air pollution and ozone loss are among the most salient impacts of stratospheric sulfate geoengineering.
Geoengineering technologies do nothing to address the drivers of the climate crisis, and all come with major risks and unknowns. For example,