Hack The Planet

I tweeted the meeting here; more on Eric Bickel’s paper later. The abstract, in which Bickel refers to geoengineering as Solar Radiation Management (SRM), is here:

Many scientists fear that anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases have set the earth on a path of significant, possibly catastrophic, changes…We find that (1) SRM may be able to effectively deal with tipping points for a fraction of the cost of emissions reductions, (2) SRM’s potential benefits are on the order of tens of trillions of dollars, (3) holding SRM until a tipping point is reached or is imminent, may be politic, but is extremely risky, since it relies on a near‐perfect early warning system, and (4) the scale of the required SRM intervention over the next 100 years is less than the SRM we are already inadvertently deploying via anthropogenic aerosol emissions. Thus, we conclude that SRM merits a serious research effort. If these results are promising, society should develop an SRM capability and be prepared to deploy it.