Monat: April 2017

Science-Policy Documents

GDAE (2017): Hope Below Our Feet. Soil as a Climate Solution

GDAE (2017): Hope Below Our Feet. Soil as a Climate Solution. With assistance of Anne-Marie Codur, Seth Itzkan, William Moomaw, Karl Thidemann, Jonathan Harris. Global Development and Environment Institute (Climate Policy Briefing, 4).

„Soils hold about three times more carbon than the atmosphere, and an increase in soil carbon content worldwide could close the “emissions gap” between carbon dioxide reductions pledged at the Paris Agreement of 2015 and those deemed necessary to limit warming to 2oC or less by 2100. To meet this challenge, several international efforts to build soil carbon have been launched, with similar measures underway in the United States.“

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Media

NBC News: Can Hacking the Planet Stop Runaway Climate Change?

„Geoengineering“ is the catch-all term for attempts to alter Earth’s climate in order to mitigate the effects of global warming. And, not surprisingly, it’s been controversial from the start. Critics have derided it as „playing God“ with the environment, and the potential risks are almost too many to tally — even its proponents stress that the consequences of large-scale climate intervention are impossible to foresee. But as the signs of global warming multiply, geoengineering is beginning to seem like a plausible solution — or at least part of a solution — to today’s climate woes. „

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Economist: The thawing Arctic threatens an environmental catastrophe

„One possibility for cooling the pole is geoengineering,[nbsp]the deliberate modification of the climate to reduce warming. Pumping sulphate aerosols into the Arctic stratosphere from high-flying aircraft could be one way to blot out a bit of the sun. Such an approach would cool Arctic summers but have little effect in winter because there would be no sunlight to reflect. Injecting salt crystals into clouds over the Arctic ocean, to enhance their reflectivity, might also encourage some cooling, though the helpfulness of this type of intervention is highly speculative.“

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Media

Gizmodo: Why the Scariest Response to Climate Change Is Finally Being Taken Seriously

„We’re not doing such a great job solving the whole climate change problem, which is why some experts think it’s time to study more radical tactics. The notion of geoengineering—hacking the climate to cool the planet—is controversial, awe-inspiring, and to many, terrifying. And yet, despite their own grave concerns with the idea, a group of researchers believes the time has come to explore whether planet-hacking might really work.“

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Peer-reviewed Publications

Lenferna, Alex; et al. (2017): Relevant Climate Response Tests for Stratospheric Aerosol Injection. A Combined Ethical and Scientific Analysis

Lenferna, Alex; Russotto, Rick; Tan, Amanda; Gardiner, Stephen; Ackerman, Thomas (2017): Relevant Climate Response Tests for Stratospheric Aerosol Injection. A Combined Ethical and Scientific Analysis. In Earth’s Future. DOI: 10.1002/2016EF000504.

„In this paper, we focus on stratospheric sulfate injection as a geoengineering scheme, and provide a combined scientific and ethical analysis of climate response tests, which are a subset of outdoor tests that would seek to impose detectable and attributable changes to climate variables on global or regional scales. We assess the current state of scientific understanding on the plausibility and scalability of climate response tests. Then we delineate a minimal baseline against which to consider whether certain climate response tests would be relevant for a deployment scenario. Our analysis shows that some climate response tests, such as those attempting to detect changes in regional climate impacts, may not be deployable in time periods relevant to realistic geoengineering scenarios. This might pose significant challenges for justifying SSI deployment overall.“

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Media

Globe and Mail: Al Gore shuns Band-Aid solutions to climate change at TED in Vancouver

„Former U.S. vice-president Al Gore is warning against massive geoengineering experiments that attempt to reverse climate change, arguing instead that the focus must remain on cutting emissions that are warming the planet. “I don’t think it’s a good idea,” Mr. Gore told the TED Conference in Vancouver, after he was invited on stage to weigh in on a debate about geoengineering.“

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Media

Nature News: March for Science, climate engineering and Chinas space station

„Geoengineering The United Kingdom unveiled an £8.6-million (US$11[nbsp]million) programme of research into geoengineering — the science of altering the planet’s systems to counter global warming — on 20[nbsp]April. The Greenhouse Gas Removal Research Programme will fund around 100 researchers working on projects that range from combining tree planting with farming in agroforestry schemes to using weathering of mining slag to absorb carbon dioxide from the air. The government-funded scheme could eventually help Britain to meet its commitment under the 2015 Paris climate agreement to try to limit global warming to 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels.“

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Peer-reviewed Publications

Adelman, Sam (2017): Geoengineering. Rights, risks and ethics

Adelman, Sam (2017): Geoengineering. Rights, risks and ethics. In JHRE 8 (1), pp.[nbsp]119–138. DOI: 10.4337/jhre.2017.01.06.

„This article discusses arguments that manipulating the Earth’s climate may provoke unforeseen, unintended and uncontrollable consequences that threaten human rights. The risks arise from both main types of geoengineering: solar radiation management (SRM) techniques and carbon dioxide removal (CDR). SRM creates particular risks because it is difficult to test on a wide scale and may not be capable of being recalled after deployment. Adequate, enforceable governance structures do not currently exist to assess and regulate the risks of climate engineering, not least whether such technologies can be terminated in the absence of significant emissions reductions.“

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