Publications

    Zhen Dai, Elizabeth T. Burns, Peter J. Irvine, Dustin H. Tingley, Jianhua Xu, and David W. Keith. 2021. “Elicitation of US and Chinese expert judgments show consistent views on solar geoengineering.” Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 8, 1, Pp. 1–9. Publisher's VersionAbstract
    Expert judgments on solar geoengineering (SG) inform policy decisions and influence public opinions. We performed face-to-face interviews using formal expert elicitation methods with 13 US and 13 Chinese climate experts randomly selected from IPCC authors or supplemented by snowball sampling. We compare their judgments on climate change, SG research, governance, and deployment. In contrast to existing literature that often stress factors that might differentiate China from western democracies on SG, we found few significant differences between quantitative judgments of US and Chinese experts. US and Chinese experts differed on topics, such as desired climate scenario and the preferred venue for international regulation of SG, providing some insight into divergent judgments that might shape future negotiations about SG policy. We also gathered closed-form survey results from 19 experts with \textgreater10 publications on SG. Both expert groups supported greatly increased research, recommending SG research funding of \textasciitilde5% on average (10th–90th percentile range was 1–10%) of climate science budgets compared to actual budgets of \textless0.3% in 2018. Climate experts chose far less SG deployment in future climate policies than did SG experts.
    Aseem Mahajan, Dustin Tingley, and Gernot Wagner. 5/2018. “Fast, cheap, and imperfect? U.S. public opinion about solar geoengineering.” Environmental Politics. Publisher's VersionAbstract
    Solar geoengineering, which seeks to cool the planet by reflecting a small fraction of sunlight back into space, has drawn the attention of scientists and policymakers as climate change remains unabated. Unlike mitigation, solar geoengineering could quickly and cheaply lower global temperatures. It is also imperfect. Its environmental impacts remain unpredictable, and its low cost and immediate effects may result in “moral hazard,” potentially crowding out costly mitigation efforts. There is little understanding about how the public will respond to such tradeoffs. To address this, a 1,000-subject nationally representative poll focused on solar geoengineering was conducted as part of the Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES) of the US electorate in October-November 2016. The importance that individuals place on solar geoengineering’s speed and cost predicts their support for it, but there is little to no relationship between their concerns about its shortcomings and support for its research and use. Acquiescence bias appears to be an important factor for attitudes around solar geoengineering and moral hazard.
    Elizabeth T. Burns, Jane A. Flegal, David W. Keith, Aseem Mahajan, Dustin Tingley, and Gernot Wagner. 11/1/2016. “What do people think when they think about solar geoengineering? A review of empirical social science literature, and prospects for future research.” Earth's Future. Publisher's VersionAbstract

    Public views and values about solar geoengineering should be incorporated in science-policy decisions, if decision makers want to act in the public interest. In reflecting on the past decade of research, we review around 30 studies investigating public familiarity with, and views about, solar geoengineering. A number of recurring patterns emerge: (1) general unfamiliarity with geoengineering among publics; (2) the importance of artifice versus naturalness; (3) some conditional support for certain kinds of research; and (4) nuanced findings on the “moral hazard” and “reverse moral hazard” hypotheses, with empirical support for each appearing under different circumstances and populations. We argue that in the coming decade, empirical social science research on solar geoengineering will be crucial, and should be integrated with physical scientific research.

    Pete Irvine, Ben Kravitz, Mark Lawrence, and Helene Muri. 7/2016. “An overview of the Earth system science of solar geoengineering.” Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change. Publisher's VersionAbstract

    Solar geoengineering has been proposed as a means to cool the Earth by increasing the reflection of sunlight back to space, for example, by injecting reflective aerosol particles (or their precursors) into the lower stratosphere. Such proposed techniques would not be able to substitute for mitigation of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions as a response to the risks of climate change, as they would only mask some of the effects of global warming. They might, however, eventually be applied as a complementary approach to reduce climate risks. Thus, the Earth system consequences of solar geoengineering are central to understanding its potentials and risks. Here we review the state-of-the-art knowledge about stratospheric sulfate aerosol injection and an idealized proxy for this, ‘sunshade geoengineering,’ in which the intensity of incoming sunlight is directly reduced in models. Studies are consistent in suggesting that sunshade geoengineering and stratospheric aerosol injection would generally offset the climate effects of elevated GHG concentrations. However, it is clear that a solar geoengineered climate would be novel in some respects, one example being a notably reduced hydrological cycle intensity. Moreover, we provide an overview of nonclimatic aspects of the response to stratospheric aerosol injection, for example, its effect on ozone, and the uncertainties around its consequences. We also consider the issues raised by the partial control over the climate that solar geoengineering would allow. Finally, this overview highlights some key research gaps in need of being resolved to provide sound basis for guidance of future decisions around solar geoengineering.

    Jane Long, James Anderson, Ken Caldeira, Joe Chaisson, David Goldston, Steven Hamburg, David Keith, Ron Lehman, Frank Loy, Granger Morgan, Daniel Sarewitz, Thomas Schelling, John Shepherd, David Victor, David Whelan, and David Winickoff. 2011. “Geoengineering: A national strategic plan for research on the potentialeffectiveness, feasibility, and consequences of climate remediation technologies.” Task Force on Climate Remediation Research, The Bipartisan Policy Center. Publisher's Version

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