Nature Climate Change

2019
Peter Irvine, Kerry Emanuel, Jie He, Larry Horowitz, Gabriel Vecchi, and David Keith. 3/11/2019. “Halving warming with idealized solar geoengineering moderates key climate hazards.” Nature Climate Change. Publisher's VersionAbstract

Solar geoengineering (SG) has the potential to restore average surface temperatures by increasing planetary albedo, but this could reduce precipitation. Thus, although SG might reduce globally aggregated risks, it may increase climate risks for some regions. Here, using the high-resolution forecast-oriented low ocean resolution (HiFLOR) model—which resolves tropical cyclones and has an improved representation of present-day precipitation extremes—alongside 12 models from the Geoengineering Model Intercomparison Project (GeoMIP), we analyse the fraction of locations that see their local climate change exacerbated or moderated by SG. Rather than restoring temperatures, we assume that SG is applied to halve the warming produced by doubling CO2 (half-SG). In HiFLOR, half-SG offsets most of the CO2-induced increase of simulated tropical cyclone intensity. Moreover, none of temperature, water availability, extreme temperature or extreme precipitation are exacerbated under half-SG when averaged over any Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Special Report on Extremes (SREX) region. Indeed, for both extreme precipitation and water availability, less than 0.4% of the ice-free land surface sees exacerbation. Thus, while concerns about the inequality of solar geoengineering impacts are appropriate, the quantitative extent of inequality may be overstated.

 

s41558-019-0398-8.pdf
2017
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
2015
Jana Sillmann, Timothy M. Lenton, Anders Levermann, Konrad Ott, Mike Hulme, Francois Benduhn, and Joshua Horton. 2015. “Climate Emergencies Do Not Justify Engineering the Climate.” Nature Climate Change. Publisher's Version
David Keith and Douglas G. MacMartin. 2015. “A temporary, moderate and responsive scenario for solar geoengineering.” Nature Climate Change, 5. Publisher's Version 174.keith_.macmartin.atemporarymoderateandresponsivescenarioforsolargeoengineering.pdf