Matzner, Nils; Böttcher, Miranda (2013): Bridging the gaps – Summer Schools on Climate Engineering. In easst review 32 (1). Available online at http://easst.net/?page_id=1467 (original) (raw)
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As the study of climate engineering (CE) is an emerging field involving a wide range of disciplines, the summer schools described here aimed to bring young researchers together and help constitute a scientific community. Since Nobel Prize laureate Paul Crutzen published his controversially discussed article in 2006 calling for research into CE methods, technologies involving the "deliberate large-scale manipulation of the planetary environment to counteract anthropogenic climate change" are being discussed seriously and the number of CE-studies is steadily increasing. While the first studies were carried out by atmospheric physicists, oceanographers, engineers, etc., social scientists, philosophers and ethicists have more recently begun to enter the field.
Climate engineering: The way forward?
Environmental Development, 2012
The deliberate large-scale manipulation of the climate is increasingly being discussed as a potential tool to ensure the basic condition for a sustainable future: a habitable climate. While far from the ideal solution, the rate of climate change continues to outpace our attempts at a response, prompting some scientists and politicians to call for the consideration of climate engineering or geoengineering to avoid catastrophic climate change, while political processes to reduce greenhouse gases catch up. A November 2010 expert meeting was held at UNESCO to raise awareness of geoengineering, its potential to counteract climate change and its risks, and to broaden the discussion within the international community. Potential geoengineering methods include solar radiation management and carbon dioxide removal techniques that are largely theoretical and remain untested, despite a long history. Responsible research can only proceed, and informed decisions be made, once governance structures have been developed beyond mere principles insufficient to guide researchers and policy makers. At the same time, realistic communication on these activities must increase and improve so that civil society can play a role in determining acceptable levels and types of human intervention. Appropriate geoengineering research should be considered for solar geoengineering methods that promise to quickly and affordably decrease global mean temperature, and for carbon geoengineering methods that target the core problem of climate change by directly removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. A small cadre of scientists and policy makers has advanced the discussion of geoengineering and its likely impacts, but the path to a sustainable future cannot Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect
The Paradox of Climate Engineering
Global Policy, 2013
Climate engineering technologies, sometimes also referred to as geoengineering technologies, attempt to ward off the worst effects of climate change by intervening in the global climate system. We see the potentials offered by climate engineering technologies in counteracting the threats of climate change but also take into account the risks that arise from the side effects of these technologies on natural, social and political systems. We find a paradox of climate engineering, which consists in the circumstance that exactly those technologies that are capable of acting fast and effectively against rising temperatures at comparatively low costs, are also the technologies that are likely to create the greatest amount of social and political conflict. To address this apparent paradox, we argue that an institutional setting for researching and potentially deploying climate engineering technologies is needed which creates a sufficiently high degree of social and political legitimacy and addresses a set of specified problems connected to climate engineering. We present a proposal for such an institutional setting that explicitly addresses these concerns. Policy Implications • Research on and potential uses of climate engineering technologies need to be coordinated internationally in a multilateral institutional setting. • An international climate engineering agency should be created that coordinates and disseminates research on climate engineering. • Research results should be evaluated by the IPCC. • Decision-making on climate engineering should occur within the UNFCCC, where the states party to that convention should decide on norms and rules that govern climate engineering (regarding, for example, an upper limit for manipulations of the radiation balance, a uniform metric for making different responses to climate change comparable, and a time limited moratorium on field tests and deployments of climate engineering technologies).
Earthmasters: the dawn of the age of climate engineering
Choice Reviews Online, 2013
After publishing two very different books on the same topic, Clive Hamilton and David Keith engaged in a public debate at Columbia University. The central question in their debate-and the question at the heart of each book-was whether humans should try to engineer the global climate to counteract climate change (C-SPAN, 2013). Each writer's book aims to introduce readers to a range of scientific, political and ethical issues surrounding climate engineering (also known as geoengineering). Each author aims to tilt readers toward a particular stance on climate engineering-against climate engineering in Hamilton's case, and cautiously for it in Keith's. Hamilton's book, being much longer, explores more issues in more detail; Keith's gives just enough of a taste to motivate the idea that climate engineering deserves serious consideration. Hamilton's first chapter explains how 20 years of failed climate policy motivated key scientists to push climate engineering into the limelight. In Chapter 2, Hamilton offers a technical explanation of the first of two kinds of climate engineering: carbon dioxide removal (CDR). He presents the scientific and practical issues surrounding a range of prominent proposals for capturing carbon from the atmosphere and squirreling it away somewhere, e.g., in trees, in the deep oceans or underground. Chapter 3 does the same thing for the other kind of climate engineering: solar radiation management (SRM). Here, Hamilton explains various proposals for reflecting a fraction of incoming sunlight back into space before it can warm the Earth. For example, one prominent proposal involves injecting tiny particles into the stratosphere. Both chapters offer clear, detailed explanations of the relevant technologies, enabling even readers without a scientific background to understand how each proposal might work and what it entails. The substance of each chapter is accurate, but the tone betrays skepticism and sometimes hostility toward the technologies. In Chapters 4 and 5, Hamilton turns to various 'players' who are or might become involved in the climate engineering debate, ranging from specific scientists to oil companies to right-wing American think tanks. These are the strangest chapters of the book. They paint supporters of climate engineering as some sort of hubristic cabal of sinister characters, bent on deploying climate engineering despite the objections of civil
The futures of climate engineering
Earth's Future
This piece examines the need to interrogate the role of the conceptions of the future, as embedded in academic papers, policy documents, climate models, and other artifacts that serve as currencies of the science-society interface, in shaping scientific and policy agendas in climate engineering. Growing bodies of work on framings, metaphors, and models in the past decade serve as valuable starting points, but can benefit from integration with science and technology studies work on the sociology of expectations, imaginaries, and visions. Potentially valuable branches of work to come might be the anticipatory use of the future: the design of experimental spaces for exploring the future of an engineered climate in service of responsible research and innovation, and the integration of this work within the unfolding context of the Paris Agreement.