Academic Publications

2018
Douglas G. MacMartin, Katharine L. Ricke, and David W. Keith. 4/2/2018. “Solar geoengineering as part of an overall strategy for meeting the 1.5°C Paris target.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, 376, 2119.Abstract
Solar geoengineering refers to deliberately reducing net radiative forcing by reflecting some sunlight back to space, in order to reduce anthropogenic climate changes; a possible such approach would be adding aerosols to the stratosphere. If future mitigation proves insufficient to limit the rise in global mean temperature to less than 1.5°C above preindustrial, it is plausible that some additional and limited deployment of solar geoengineering could reduce climate damages. That is, these approaches could eventually be considered as part of an overall strategy to manage the risks of climate change, combining emissions reduction, net-negative emissions technologies and solar geoengineering to meet climate goals. We first provide a physical science review of current research, research trends and some of the key gaps in knowledge that would need to be addressed to support informed decisions. Next, since few climate model simulations have considered these limited-deployment scenarios, we synthesize prior results to assess the projected response if solar geoengineering were used to limit global mean temperature to 1.5°C above preindustrial in an overshoot scenario that would otherwise peak near 3°C. While there are some important differences, the resulting climate is closer in many respects to a climate where the 1.5°C target is achieved through mitigation alone than either is to the 3◦C climate with no geoengineering. This holds for both regional temperature and precipitation changes; indeed, there are no regions where a majority of models project that this moderate level of geoengineering would produce a statistically significant shift in precipitation further away from preindustrial levels. This article is part of the theme issue ‘The Paris Agreement: understanding the physical and social challenges for a warming world of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels’.
macmartin_ricke_keith_ptrs.pdf
Andy Parker and Peter Irvine. 3/11/2018. “The Risk of Termination Shock From Solar Geoengineering.” Earth's Future, 6, Pp. 456-467. Publisher's VersionAbstract
If solar geoengineering were to be deployed so as to mask a high level of global warming, and then stopped suddenly, there would be a rapid and damaging rise in temperatures. This effect is often referred to as termination shock, and it is an influential concept. Based on studies of its potential impacts, commentators often cite termination shock as one of the greatest risks of solar geoengineering. However, there has been little consideration of the likelihood of termination shock, so that conclusions about its risk are premature. This paper explores the physical characteristics of termination shock, then uses simple scenario analysis to plot out the pathways by which different driver events (such as terrorist attacks, natural disasters, or political action) could lead to termination. It then considers where timely policies could intervene to avert termination shock. We conclude that some relatively simple policies could protect a solar geoengineering system against most of the plausible drivers. If backup deployment hardware were maintained and if solar geoengineering were implemented by agreement among just a few powerful countries, then the system should be resilient against all but the most extreme catastrophes. If this analysis is correct, then termination shock should be much less likely, and therefore much less of a risk, than has previously been assumed. Much more sophisticated scenario analysis—going beyond simulations purely of worst‐case scenarios—will be needed to allow for more insightful policy conclusions.
parker_et_al-2018-earths_future.pdf
Sebastian D. Eastham, David W. Keith, and Steven R. H. Barrett. 3/9/2018. “Mortality tradeoff between air quality and skin cancer from changes in stratospheric ozone.” Environmental Research Letters, 13, 3. Publisher's VersionAbstract
Skin cancer mortality resulting from stratospheric ozone depletion has been widely studied. Similarly, there is a deep body of literature on surface ozone and its health impacts, with modeling and observational studies demonstrating that surface ozone concentrations can be increased when stratospheric air mixes to the Earth's surface. We offer the first quantitative estimate of the trade-off between these two effects, comparing surface air quality benefits and UV-related harms from stratospheric ozone depletion. Applying an idealized ozone loss term in the stratosphere of a chemistry-transport model for modern-day conditions, we find that each Dobson unit of stratospheric ozone depletion results in a net decrease in the global annual mortality rate of ~40 premature deaths per billion population (d/bn/DU). The impacts are spatially heterogeneous in sign and magnitude, composed of a reduction in premature mortality rate due to ozone exposure of ~80 d/bn/DU concentrated in Southeast Asia, and an increase in skin cancer mortality rate of ~40 d/bn/DU, mostly in Western Europe. This is the first study to quantify air quality benefits of stratospheric ozone depletion, and the first to find that marginal decreases in stratospheric ozone around modern-day values could result in a net reduction in global mortality due to competing health impact pathways. This result, which is subject to significant methodological uncertainty, highlights the need to understand the health and environmental trade-offs involved in policy decisions regarding anthropogenic influences on ozone chemistry over the 21st century.
eastham_2018_environ._res._letters.pdf
Kristina Mohlin, Jonathan R. Camuzeaux, Adrian Muller, Marius Schneider, and Gernot Wagner. 2/12/2018. “Factoring in the forgotten role of renewables in CO2 emission trends using decomposition analysis.” Energy Policy, 116, Pp. 290–296. Publisher's VersionAbstract
This paper introduces an approach for separately quantifying the contributions from renewables in decomposition analysis. So far, decomposition analyses of the drivers of national CO2 emissions have typically considered the combined energy mix as an explanatory factor without an explicit consideration or separation of renewables. As the cost of renewables continues to decrease, it becomes increasingly relevant to track their role in CO2 emission trends. Index decomposition analysis, in particular, provides a simple approach for doing so using publicly available data. We look to the U.S. as a case study, highlighting differences with the more detailed but also more complex structural decomposition analysis. Between 2007 and 2013, U.S. CO2 emissions decreased by around 10%—a decline not seen since the oil crisis of 1979. Prior analyses have identified the shale gas boom and the economic recession as the main explanatory factors. However, by decomposing the fuel mix effect, we conclude that renewables played an equally important role as natural gas in reducing CO2 emissions between 2007 and 2013: renewables decreased total emissions by 2.3–3.3%, roughly matching the 2.5–3.6% contribution from the shift to natural gas, compared with 0.6–1.5% for nuclear energy.
J. Paul Kelleher and Gernot Wagner. 2/2018. “Ramsey discounting calls for subtracting climate damages from economic growth rates.” Applied Economics Letters. Publisher's VersionAbstract
The Ramsey equation ties the utility discount rate and the elasticity of marginal utility of consumption together with per capita consumption growth rates to calculate consumption discount rates. For many applications, per capita consumption growth rates can be approximated with per capita output growth rates. That approximation does not work for climate change, which drives an ever-increasing and increasingly uncertain wedge between output and consumption growth. NAS (2017), in a central recommendation and illustrative example, conflates the two. The correct, consumption-based discounting method generally decreases consumption discount rates and, thus, increases the resulting Social Cost of Carbon Dioxide (SC-CO2).
Zhen Dai, Debra Weisenstein, and David Keith. 1/2018. “Tailoring Meridional and Seasonal Radiative Forcing by Sulfate Aerosol Solar Geoengineering.” Geophysical Research Letters, 45. Publisher's VersionAbstract
We study the possibility of designing solar radiation management schemes to achieve a desired meridional radiative forcing (RF) profile using a two-dimensional chemistry-transport-aerosol model. Varying SO2 or H2SO4 injection latitude, altitude, and season, we compute RF response functions for a broad range of possible injection schemes, finding that linear combinations of these injection cases can roughly achieve RF profiles that have been proposed to accomplish various climate objectives. Globally averaged RF normalized by the sulfur injection rate (the radiative efficacy) is largest for injections at high altitudes, near the equator, and using emission of H2SO4 vapor into an aircraft wake to produce accumulation-mode particles. There is a trade-off between radiative efficacy and control as temporal and spatial control is best achieved with injections at lower altitudes and higher latitudes. These results may inform studies using more realistic models that couple aerosol microphysics, chemistry, and stratospheric dynamics.
dai_et_al-2018-geophysical_research_letters.pdf
Joshua B. Horton. 2018. “Parametric Insurance as an Alternative to Liability for Compensating Climate Harms.” Carbon & Climate Law Review, 12, 4, Pp. 285-296. Publisher's VersionAbstract

Interstate compensation for climate change based on legal liability faces serious obstacles. Structural incongruities related to causation, time, scope, and scale impede application of tort law to climate change, while political opposition from developed countries prevents intergovernmental consideration of liability as a means of compensating for climate damages. Insurance, however, in particular parametric insurance triggered by objective environmental indices, is emerging as a promising alternative to liability. This is manifest in the UNFCCC and the Paris Agreement, which ruled out recourse to legal liability, and in the formation and expansion of regional sovereign climate risk insurance schemes in the Caribbean, Africa, and the Pacific. Theory and early practice suggest that parametric insurance exhibits five key advantages compared to legal liability in the climate change context: (1) it does not require that causation be demonstrated; (2) it has evolved to provide catastrophic coverage; (3) it is oriented toward the future rather than the past; (4) it is contractual, rather than adversarial, in nature; and (5) it provides a high degree of predictability. Compensation based on parametric insurance represents a novel climate policy option with significant potential to advance climate politics.

horton_2018.pdf
2017
Paul Bodnar, Caroline Ott, Rupert Edwards, Stephan Hoch, Emily F. McGlynn, and Gernot Wagner. 12/4/2017. “Underwriting 1.5°C: competitive approaches to financing accelerated climate change mitigation.” Climate Policy. Publisher's VersionAbstract

Delivering emission reductions consistent with a 1.5°C trajectory will require innovative public financial instruments designed to mobilize trillions of dollars of low-carbon private investment. Traditional public subsidy instruments such as grants and concessional loans, while critical to supporting nascent technologies or high-capital-cost projects, do not provide the price signals required to shift private investments towards low-carbon alternatives at a scale. Programmes that underwrite the value of emission reductions using auctioned price floors provide price certainty over long time horizons, thus improving the cost-effectiveness of limited public funds while also catalysing private investment.

Taking lessons from the World Bank’s Pilot Auction Facility, which supports methane and nitrous oxide mitigation projects, and the United Kingdom’s Contracts for Difference programme, which supports renewable energy deployment, we show that auctioned price floors can be applied to a variety of sectors with greater efficiency and scalability than traditional subsidy instruments. We explore how this new class of instrument can enhance the cost-effectiveness of carbon pricing and complementary policies needed to achieve a 1.5°C outcome, including through large-scale adoption by the Green Climate Fund and other international and domestic climate finance vehicles.

Key policy insights

  • Traditional public climate finance interventions such as grants and concessional loans have not mobilized private capital at the scale needed to decarbonize the world economy consistent with the 2°C target, much less 1.5°C, and will likely face ongoing constraints in the future.
  • Auctioned price floors – subsidies that offer a guaranteed price for future emission reductions – maximize climate impact per public dollar while incentivizing private investment in low-carbon technologies.
  • This new subsidy instrument, if applied at scale via the Green Climate Fund and other domestic and international climate finance vehicles, can promote private sector competition to bring down technology costs and drive innovation, thereby supporting a longer term transition to regulation and sector- or economy-wide carbon markets.
  • To facilitate the transition from public subsidy to the market-based support of climate mitigation, auctioned price floors should work in tandem with carbon pricing and complementary policies, using the same accounting and monitoring, reporting and verification toolkits.
Jonas Meckling, Thomas Sterner, and Gernot Wagner. 11/13/2017. “Policy sequencing toward decarbonization.” Nature Energy. Publisher's VersionAbstract
Many economists have long held that carbon pricing—either through a carbon tax or cap-and-trade—is the most cost-effective way to decarbonize energy systems, along with subsidies for basic research and development. Meanwhile, green innovation and industrial policies aimed at fostering low-carbon energy technologies have proliferated widely. Most of these predate direct carbon pricing. Low-carbon leaders such as California and the European Union (EU) have followed a distinct policy sequence that helps overcome some of the political challenges facing low-carbon policy by building economic interest groups in support of decarbonization and reducing the cost of technologies required for emissions reductions. However, while politically effective, this policy pathway faces significant challenges to environmental and cost effectiveness, including excess rent capture and lock-in. Here we discuss options for addressing these challenges under political constraints. As countries move toward deeper emissions cuts, combining and sequencing policies will prove critical to avoid environmental, economic, and political dead-ends in decarbonizing energy systems.
Dustin Tingley and Gernot Wagner. 10/31/2017. “Solar geoengineering and the chemtrails conspiracy on social media.” Palgrave Communications, 3, 12. Publisher's VersionAbstract
Discourse on social media of solar geoengineering has been rapidly increasing over the past decade, in line with increased attention by the scientific community and low but increasing awareness among the general public. The topic has also found increased attention online. But unlike scientific discourse, a majority of online discussion focuses on the so-called chemtrails conspiracy theory, the widely debunked idea that airplanes are spraying a toxic mix of chemicals through contrails, with supposed goals ranging from weather to mind control. This paper presents the results of a nationally representative 1000-subject poll part of the 36,000-subject 2016 Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES), and an analysis of the universe of social media mentions of geoengineering. The former shows ~ 10% of Americans declaring the chemtrails conspiracy as “completely” and a further ~ 20–30% as “somewhat” true, with no apparent difference by party affiliation or strength of partisanship. Conspiratorial views have accounted for ~ 60% of geoengineering discourse on social media over the past decade. Of that, Twitter has accounted for >90%, compared to ~ 75% of total geoengineering mentions. Further affinity analysis reveals a broad online community of conspiracy. Anonymity of social media appears to help its spread, so does the general ease of spreading unverified or outright false information. Online behavior has important real-world reverberations, with implications for climate science communication and policy.
David W. Keith, Gernot Wagner, and Claire L. Zabel. 9/1/2017. “Solar geoengineering reduces atmospheric carbon burden.” Nature Climate Change, 7, Pp. 617–619. Publisher's VersionAbstract

Solar geoengineering is no substitute for cutting emissions, but could nevertheless help reduce the atmospheric carbon burden. In the extreme, if solar geoengineering were used to hold radiative forcing constant under RCP8.5, the carbon burden may be reduced by ~100 GTC, equivalent to 12–26% of twenty-first-century emissions at a cost of under US$0.5 per tCO2.

solar_geoengineering_reduces_atmospheric_carbon_burden.pdf
Masahiro Sugiyama, Shinichiro Asayama, Atsushi Ishii, Takanobu Kosugi, John C. Moore, Jolene Lin, Penehuro F. Lefale, Wil Burns, Masatomo Fujiwara, Arunabha Ghosh, Joshua Horton, Atsushi Kurosawa, Andy Parker, Michael Thompson, Pak-Hang Wong, and Lili Xia. 7/4/2017. “The Asia-Pacific’s role in the emerging solar geoengineering debate.” Climatic Change. Publisher's VersionAbstract
Increasing interest in climate engineering in recent years has led to calls by the international research community for international research collaboration as well as global public engagement. But making such collaboration a reality is challenging. Here, we report the summary of a 2016 workshop on the significance and challenges of international collaboration on climate engineering research with a focus on the Asia-Pacific region. Because of the region’s interest in benefits and risks of climate engineering, there is a potential synergy between impact research on anthropogenic global warming and that on solar radiation management. Local researchers in the region can help make progress toward better understanding of impacts of solar radiation management. These activities can be guided by an ad hoc Asia-Pacific working group on climate engineering, a voluntary expert network. The working group can foster regional conversations in a sustained manner while contributing to capacity building. An important theme in the regional conversation is to develop effective practices of dialogues in light of local backgrounds such as cultural traditions and past experiences of large-scale technology development. Our recommendation merely portrays one of several possible ways forward, and it is our hope to stimulate the debate in the region.
asia_pacific_role_in_solar_geoengineering_debate.pdf
Ilissa B. Ocko, Steven P. Hamburg, Daniel J. Jacob, David W. Keith, Nathaniel O. Keohane, Michael Oppenheimer, Joseph D. Roy-Mayhew, Daniel P. Schrag, and Stephen W. Pacala. 5/5/2017. “Unmask temporal trade-offs in climate policy debates.” Science, 356, 6337, Pp. 492-493. Publisher's VersionAbstract

Global warming potentials (GWPs) have become an essential element of climate policy and are built into legal structures that regulate greenhouse gas emissions. This is in spite of a well-known shortcoming: GWP hides trade-offs between short- and long-term policy objectives inside a single time scale of 100 or 20 years (1). The most common form, GWP100, focuses on the climate impact of a pulse emission over 100 years, diluting near-term effects and misleadingly implying that short-lived climate pollutants exert forcings in the long-term, long after they are removed from the atmosphere (2). Meanwhile, GWP20 ignores climate effects after 20 years. We propose that these time scales be ubiquitously reported as an inseparable pair, much like systolic-diastolic blood pressure and city-highway vehicle fuel economy, to make the climate effect of using one or the other time scale explicit. Policy-makers often treat a GWP as a value-neutral measure, but the time-scale choice is central to achieving specific objectives (2–4).

science.pdf
Matthias Honegger, Steffen Munch, Annette Hirsch, Christoph Beuttler, Thomas Peter, Wil Burns, Oliver Genden, Timo Goeschl, Daniel Gregorowius, David Keith, Markus Lederer, Axel Michaelowa, Janos Pasztor, Stefan Schafer, Sonia Seneviratne, Andrea Stenke, Anthony Patt, and Ivo Wallimann-Helmer. 5/2017. Climate change, negative emissions and solar radiation management: It is time for an open societal conversation. Risk-Dialogue Foundation St.Gallen for the Swiss Federal Office for the Environment. honegger_et_al._-_climate_change_negative_emissions_and_solar_radia.pdf
David Keith. 4/2017. “Toward a Responsible Solar Geoengineering Research Program.” Issues in Science and Technology, 33, 3. Publisher's Version Issues in Science and Technology.pdf
Jeremy Proville, Daniel Zavala-Araiza, and Gernot Wagner. 3/27/2017. “Night-time lights: A global, long term look at links to socio-economic trends.” PLoS ONE, 12, 3. Publisher's VersionAbstract
We use a parallelized spatial analytics platform to process the twenty-one year totality of the longest-running time series of night-time lights data—the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) dataset—surpassing the narrower scope of prior studies to assess changes in area lit of countries globally. Doing so allows a retrospective look at the global, long-term relationships between night-time lights and a series of socio-economic indicators. We find the strongest correlations with electricity consumption, CO2 emissions, and GDP, followed by population, CH4 emissions, N2O emissions, poverty (inverse) and F-gas emissions. Relating area lit to electricity consumption shows that while a basic linear model provides a good statistical fit, regional and temporal trends are found to have a significant impact.
night_time_lights.pdf
Peter J. Irvine, Ben Kravitz, Mark G. Lawrence, Dieter Gerten, Cyril Caminade, Simon N.Gosling, Erica J. Hendy, Belay T. Kassie, W. Daniel Kissling, Helene Muri, Andreas Oschlies, and Steven J. Smith. 1/24/2017. “Towards a comprehensive climate impacts assessment of solar geoengineering.” Earth's Future, 5, Pp. 93–106. Publisher's VersionAbstract

Despite a growing literature on the climate response to solar geoengineering—proposals to cool the planet by increasing the planetary albedo—there has been little published on the impacts of solar geoengineering on natural and human systems such as agriculture, health, water resources, and ecosystems. An understanding of the impacts of different scenarios of solar geoengineering deployment will be crucial for informing decisions on whether and how to deploy it. Here we review the current stateof knowledge about impacts of a solar-geoengineered climate and identify the major research gaps. We suggest that a thorough assessment of the climate impacts of a range of scenarios of solar geoengineering deployment is needed and can be built upon existing frameworks. However, solar geoengineering poses a novel challenge for climate impacts research as the manner of deployment could be tailored to pursue different objectives making possible a wide range of climate outcomes. We present a number of ideas for approaches to extend the survey of climate impacts beyond standard scenarios of solargeoengineering deployment to address this challenge. Reducing the impacts of climate change is the fundamental motivator for emissions reductions and for considering whether and how to deploy solargeoengineering. This means that the active engagement of the climate impacts research community will be important for improving the overall understanding of the opportunities, challenges, and risks presented by solar geoengineering.

irvine_et_al-2017-earths_future.pdf
2016
Jesse L. Reynolds, Andy Parker, and Peter Irvine. 12/13/2016. “Five solar geoengineering tropes that have outstayed their welcome.” Earth's Future, 4, Pp. 562–568. Publisher's VersionAbstract

In the last decade, solar geoengineering (solar radiation management, or SRM) has receivedincreasing consideration as a potential means to reduce risks of anthropogenic climate change. Some ideas regarding SRM that have been proposed have receded after being appropriately scrutinized, while others have strengthened through testing and critique. This process has improved the understanding ofSRM’s potential and limitations. However, several claims are frequently made in the academic and popular SRM discourses and, despite evidence to the contrary, pose the risk of hardening into accepted facts. Here, in order to foster a more productive and honest debate, we identify, describe, and refute five of the most problematic claims that are unsupported by existing evidence, unlikely to occur, or greatly exaggerated. These are: (A) once started, SRM cannot be stopped; (B) SRM is a right-wing project; (C) SRM wouldcost only a few billion dollars per year; (D) modeling studies indicate that SRM would disrupt monsoonprecipitation; and (E) there is an international prohibition on outdoors research. SRM is a controversial proposed set of technologies that could prove to be very helpful or very harmful, and it warrants vigorous and informed public debate. By highlighting and debunking some persistent but unsupported claims, this paper hopes to bring rigor to such discussions.

reynolds_et_al-2016-earths_future.pdf
David Keith, Debra Weisenstein, John Dykema, and Frank Keutsch. 12/12/2016. “Stratospheric Solar Geoengineering without Ozone Loss.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Publisher's VersionAbstract

Injecting sulfate aerosol into the stratosphere, the most frequently analyzed proposal for solar geoengineering, may reduce some climate risks, but it would also entail new risks, including ozone loss and heating of the lower tropical stratosphere, which, in turn, would increase water vapor concentration causing additional ozone loss and surface warming. We propose a method for stratospheric aerosol climate modification that uses a solid aerosol composed of alkaline metal salts that will convert hydrogen halides and nitric and sulfuric acids into stable salts to enable stratospheric geoengineering while reducing or reversing ozone depletion. Rather than minimizing reactive effects by reducing surface area using high refractive index materials, this method tailors the chemical reactivity. Specifically, we calculate that injection of calcite (CaCO3) aerosol particles might reduce net radiative forcing while simultaneously increasing column ozone toward its preanthropogenic baseline. A radiative forcing of −1 W⋅m−2, for example, might be achieved with a simultaneous 3.8% increase in column ozone using 2.1 Tg⋅y−1 of 275-nm radius calcite aerosol. Moreover, the radiative heating of the lower stratosphere would be roughly 10-fold less than if that same radiative forcing had been produced using sulfate aerosol. Although solar geoengineering cannot substitute for emissions cuts, it may supplement them by reducing some of the risks of climate change. Further research on this and similar methods could lead to reductions in risks and improved efficacy of solar geoengineering methods.

keith_et_al._-_2016_-_stratospheric_solar_geoengineering_without_ozone_l.pdf
David W. Keith and Peter J. Irvine. 11/30/2016. “Solar geoengineering could substantially reduce climate risks — A research hypothesis for the next decade.” Earth's Future, 4, Pp. 549–559. Publisher's VersionAbstract

We offer a hypothesis that if solar geoengineering (SG) were deployed to offset half of the increase in global-mean temperature from the date of deployment using a technology and deployment method chosen to approximate a reduction in the solar constant then, over the 21st century, it would (a) substantially reduce the global aggregate risks of climate change, (b) without making any country worse off, and (c) with the aggregate risks from side-effects being small in comparison to the reduction in climate risks. We do not set out to demonstrate this hypothesis; rather we propose it with the goal of stimulating a strategic engagement of the SG research community with policy-relevant questions. We elaborate seven sub-hypotheses on the effects of our scenario for key risks of climate change that could be assessed in future modeling work. As an example, we provide a defence of one of our sub-hypotheses, that our scenario of SG would reduce the risk of drought in dry regions, but also identify issues that may undermine this sub-hypothesis and how future work could resolve this question. SG cannot substitute for emissions mitigation but it may be a useful supplement. It is our hope that scientific and technical research over the next decade focuses more closely on well-articulated variants of the key policy-relevant question: could SG be designed and deployed in such a way that it could substantially and equitably reduce climate risks?

keith_et_al-2016-earths_future.pdf

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