Monat: November 2016

Peer-reviewed Publications

McLaren, Duncan (2016): Mitigation deterrence and the ‘moral hazard’

McLaren, Duncan (2016): Mitigation deterrence and the ‘moral hazard’. In Earth’s Future. DOI 10.1002/2016EF000445.

„Fears of a moral hazard effect deterring mitigation have dogged SRM research since before 2006. Researchers have debated the significance and relevance of this concern from multiple disciplines and perspectives. The paper explores this debate, highlighting the significance of policy goals and the actual and perceived substitutability of SRM for mitigation.“

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Calls

Job/fellowship: Apply to be an Environmental Fellow at Harvard

Deadline: 18. January 2017

„The Harvard University Center for the Environment created the Environmental Fellows program to enable recent doctorate recipients to use and expand Harvard’s extraordinary resources to tackle complex environmental problems. The Environmental Fellows will work for two years with Harvard faculty members in any school or department to create new knowledge while also strengthening connections across the University’s academic disciplines.“

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Media

FCEA Blog: Commentary: A response to Wil Burns: Common Misunderstandings About SRM Geoengineering

„We welcomed the response of Wil Burns to our recent article, “Five solar geoengineering tropes that have outstayed their welcome.” In our article, we cited five common but inaccurate claims about SRM. Burns responded to three of our rebuttals, concluding that our article “doesn’t wholly dispel many of the concerns outlined in the piece.” Ultimately, in his comments we have not found anything that refutes what we wrote. We remain convinced that the claims that we cited are unsupported by existing evidence, unlikely to occur, or greatly exaggerated.“

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Peer-reviewed Publications

Markusson, Nils; et al. (2017): The political economy of technical fixes. A case from the climate domain

Markusson, Nils; Dahl Gjefsen, Mads; Stephens, Jennie C.; Tyfield, David (2017): The political economy of technical fixes. A case from the climate domain. In Energy Research [&] Social Science 23, pp. 1–10. DOI 10.1016/j.erss.2016.11.004.

„This paper argues that existing critiques of technical fixes are unable to explain our simultaneous enamourment and distrust with technical fixes, and that to do so, we need a political economy analysis. We develop a critical, theoretically grounded conceptualisation of technical fixes as imagined defensive spatio-temporal fixes of specific political economic regimes, and apply it to the case of geoengineering, or ‘clean fossil’, as an attempted technical fix of the climate change problem. We map the promises of clean fossil as proposed solutions to the problem of climate change in discrete episodes since the 1960s.“

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Peer-reviewed Publications

Quaas, Johannes; et al. (2016): Regional climate engineering by radiation management: Prerequisites and prospects

Quaas, Johannes; Quaas, Martin F.; Boucher, Olivier; Rickels, Wilfried (2016): Regional climate engineering by radiation management: Prerequisites and prospects. In Earth’s Future. DOI 10.1002/2016EF000440.

„In this paper, we discuss the idea that RM can be differentiated and scaled in several dimensions with potential objectives being to influence a certain climate parameter in a specific region. Some short-lived climate forcers (e.g., tropospheric aerosols) exhibit strong geographical and temporal variability, potentially leading to limited- area climate responses. Marine cloud brightening and thinning or dissolution of cirrus clouds could be operated at a rather local scale.“

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Peer-reviewed Publications

Moore, John C.; et al (2016): Will China be the first to initiate climate engineering?

Moore, John C.; Chen, Ying; Cui, Xuefeng; Yuan, Wenping; Dong, Wenjie; Gao, Yun; Shi, Peijun (2016): Will China be the first to initiate climate engineering? In Earth’s Future. DOI 10.1002/2016EF000402.

„But will China be the first to pioneer climate engineering? The answer, we argue here, is likely to be „no!“ We reach this conclusion from an analysis of the historic philosophical tradition that informs the Chinese world view, China’s experience of mega-engineering projects both ancient and modern, and the policies implemented over the last 60 years.“

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