Climate policymakers and assessments must get serious about climate engineering

Parson, Edward A.

doi:10.1073/pnas.1713456114

Cited by 47 publications

(23 citation statements)

References 15 publications

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“…Because of the scale at which these technologies would need to be implemented, and the fact that their commercial and technological viability is in many cases unknown, models assume that NETs will only be operational at scale in the second half of the century. Essentially, this means that the negative emissions concept acts as a debt mechanism: the carbon budget for the first half of the 21 st century can be extended on the basis of the assumption that large amounts of carbon will be removed in the second half (Geden , ; Parson ). As Geden (:381) puts it, integrated assessment modellers have in this way “adopted the standard approach pursued by most governments instead of disciplining them: run huge deficits, betting on payback by future generations”.…”

Section: Going Into Carbon Debt: Negative Emissions As Spatiotemporalmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The stabilisation of greenhouse gas concentrations at low levels was largely deemed to be economically unfeasible. When policy makers agreed on 2°C as the political target and subsequently asked modellers to come up with scenarios that would be compatible with this, this posed a substantial challenge (Parson ; Tavoni and Socolow ). The only way in which the modelling community could meet this request within their cost‐efficiency framework was by including hypothetical NETs, such as BECCS (Dooley et al.…”

Section: Going Into Carbon Debt: Negative Emissions As Spatiotemporalmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…). The inclusion of negative emissions in IAMs, in other words, was the direct result of a cost‐minimisation exercise (Parson ), of efforts to uphold the idea that significant mitigation is still achievable in a cost‐effective way. A rejection of negative emissions in IAMs would by definition require far more radical short‐term mitigation to meet the 2°C/1.5°C targets (see van Vuuren et al.…”

Section: Going Into Carbon Debt: Negative Emissions As Spatiotemporalmentioning

confidence: 99%

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“Fixing” Climate Change by Mortgaging the Future: Negative Emissions, Spatiotemporal Fixes, and the Political Economy of Delay

Carton

2019

Antipode

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Models suggest that climate change mitigation now depends on negative emissions, i.e. the large‐scale removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. This assumption has been criticised in the climate policy literature for being unfeasible and unjust. This article asks how critical scholars can make sense of, and contribute to these debates. It suggests that negative emissions can be conceived of as a spatiotemporal fix that promises to defer the devaluation of fixed capital. But the negative emissions example also challenges us to broaden our conception of how the socioecological contradictions of capitalism can be “fixed”. I outline three ways in which it does this by highlighting the significance of a predominantly temporal fix, the role of hegemonic, sociopolitical interventions involving multiple actors, and the possibility of safeguarding existing production processes. I conclude that spatiotemporal fixes to climate change should be seen as part of a wider political economy of delay in devaluing carbon‐intensive accumulation processes.

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Section: Going Into Carbon Debt: Negative Emissions As Spatiotemporalmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Going Into Carbon Debt: Negative Emissions As Spatiotemporalmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Going Into Carbon Debt: Negative Emissions As Spatiotemporalmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

“Fixing” Climate Change by Mortgaging the Future: Negative Emissions, Spatiotemporal Fixes, and the Political Economy of Delay

Carton

2019

Antipode

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“…It has the potential to partially offset the radiative forcing caused by longlived greenhouse gases, thereby reducing some of the risks of climate change (Crutzen, 2006;Keith & Dowlatabadi, 1992;National Research Council, 2015). Solar geoengineering has gained interest in recent years given the cost and slow rate of mitigation, as well as uncertainties surrounding abrupt climate change (Parson, 2017). Solar geoengineering has gained interest in recent years given the cost and slow rate of mitigation, as well as uncertainties surrounding abrupt climate change (Parson, 2017).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Production of Sulfates Onboard an Aircraft: Implications for the Cost and Feasibility of Stratospheric Solar Geoengineering

Smith

Dykema

Keith

2018

Earth and Space Science

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Injection of sulfate aerosols into the stratosphere, a form of solar geoengineering, has been proposed as a means to reduce some climatic changes by decreasing net anthropogenic radiative forcing. The cost and technical feasibility of forming aerosols with the appropriate size distribution are uncertain. We examine the possibility of producing the relevant sulfur species, SO2 or SO3, by in situ conversion from elemental sulfur onboard an aircraft. We provide a first‐order engineering analysis of an open cycle chemical plant for in situ sulfur to sulfate conversion using a Brayton cycle combustor and a catalytic converter. We find that such a plant could have sufficiently low mass that the overall requirement for mass transport to the lower stratosphere may be reduced by roughly a factor of 2. All else equal, this suggests that—for a given radiative forcing—the cost of delivering sulfate aerosols may be nearly halved. Beyond reducing cost, the use of elemental sulfur reduces operational health and safety risks and should therefore reduce environmental side effects associated with delivery. Reduction in cost is not necessarily beneficial as it reduces practical barriers to deployment, increasing the urgency of questions concerning the efficacy, risks, and governance of solar geoengineering.

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“…According to the Hadley Centre-Climatic Research Unit Version 4 (HadCRUT4) data set (Morice et al, 2012(Morice et al, ), 2015(Morice et al, , 2016(Morice et al, , and 2017 were the warmest years since records began in 1850 (Osborn, 2018;UK Met Office, 2018). In the face of dangerous climate change and insufficient current ambition to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions for achieving the international climate goal set in the Paris Agreement (Höhne et al, 2017;Rogelj et al, 2016), potential geoengineering methods that aim at deliberately cooling the climate have received increased attention (e.g., Chen & Xin, 2017;Parson, 2017).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Best Scale for Detecting the Effects of Stratospheric Sulfate Aerosol Geoengineering on Surface Temperature

Charlton‐Perez²,

Highwood³

et al. 2018

Earth's Future

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Stratospheric sulfate aerosol injection (SAI) has been proposed as a way to geoengineer climate. While swift global mean surface cooling is generally expected from tropical SAI, the regional impacts of such perturbation on near‐surface air temperature (SAT) are projected to be spatially inhomogeneous. By using existing simulations from the Geoengineering Model Intercomparison Project G4 scenario, where 5 Tg/year of sulfur dioxide (SO2) is injected into the tropical stratosphere to offset some of the warming in a midrange representative greenhouse gas concentration pathway (RCP4.5) between 2020 and 2070, we examine the regional detectability of the SAI surface cooling effect and attempt to find the best spatial scale for potential SAI monitoring. We use optimal fingerprint detection and attribution techniques to estimate the time horizon over which the SAI surface cooling effect would be detected after implementation in 2020 on subglobal scales, ranging from the near‐global in situ observational coverage down to subcontinental regions. We show that using the spatiotemporal SAT pattern across the Northern and Southern extratropics and the Tropics, and across the Northern and Southern Hemispheres, as well as averaging SATs over the whole globe robustly result in successful SAI detection within 10 years of geoengineering implementation in a majority of the included plausible geoengineering realizations. However, detecting the SAI effect on SAT within the first decade of implementation would be more challenging on subcontinental scales.

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Climate policymakers and assessments must get serious about climate engineering

Cited by 47 publications

References 15 publications

“Fixing” Climate Change by Mortgaging the Future: Negative Emissions, Spatiotemporal Fixes, and the Political Economy of Delay

“Fixing” Climate Change by Mortgaging the Future: Negative Emissions, Spatiotemporal Fixes, and the Political Economy of Delay

Production of Sulfates Onboard an Aircraft: Implications for the Cost and Feasibility of Stratospheric Solar Geoengineering

Best Scale for Detecting the Effects of Stratospheric Sulfate Aerosol Geoengineering on Surface Temperature

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