Beyond 1.5 Series | Just in case: What do we need to know about climate intervention?

Good afternoon everyone and welcome to our Beyond 1.5 webinar series. I'm Heather Goldstone, Chief Communications Officer at Woodwell Climate, and I'm particularly glad to welcome you to this, the fourth in our fall event series on this particularly busy week. For anyone interested in climate. I'm referring of course to the UN climate talks going on in Glasgow right now, COP26. Woodwell has nine staffers on the ground there talking about everything from Arctic warming to tropical forests and pushing for greater ambition. You can follow along with everything that we've got going on and some of the biggest insights from the conference on our website. Just go to our homepage and click on the link in the banner at the top or you can go straight to woodwellclimate.org cop26 and we have daily updates coming back. I believe to today's update is on its way up into the ethers right now, getting posted on the web right now, so lots going on there. I also wanted to give everyone a little bit of a heads up. Well, first of all, let me see. This is one of our more intimate gatherings, both in terms of audience size and the size of our panel today, which I think is actually a great thing. But could I just see a show of virtual hands? If this is the first event with Woodwell Climate that you're joining today.

We've.

Got a dozen or so, I think. Thank you. A special thank you to those of you joining us for the first time, and thank you so much to the rest of you who are returning to this series that we really have designed to be a series of events, a series of conversations that lead us through a whole thought process relating to the risks we face and the choices that we have in front of us as we shape our climate future. Our final event is still tentatively scheduled for two weeks from now, but I wanted to give you all a heads up that one of our participants in that event has encountered a family situation and we are working to either reconfigure that event a little bit or perhaps reschedule it. We will keep you up to date and appreciate your understanding with that. It happens to everyone. So we are really excited about that.

Event though, and hope you will join us.

So before we jump into today's conversation, I want to, as I've done each time, thank the Knab family for their support of these virtual events. It's really been a treat to start doing these virtual events and see just how many people we can reach around the globe and connect with, both in terms of the panelists that we can bring into our events and also, of course, the audiences we can reach. So we're so grateful for that support. I also wanted to acknowledge that I'm hosting this event and speaking to you today from our campus in what is known as Falmouth, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod. It is the traditional and sacred land of the Wampanoag people who have lived here for thousands of years and whose language, culture, ways of life all continue to be vibrant parts of our community. We also recognize that indigenous leadership and land stewardship are critical to in helping us achieve a healthy and stable climate future. It's one reason why some of the early pledges coming back from Glasgow have been particularly heartening. I'm sure you all saw the news yesterday that more than 100 heads of state from nations representing more than 85% of the world's forests committed to ending deforestation by 2030 and mobilizing billions of doll in public and private funding to meet that goal. Now, we have seen pledges like this before, and the fact that we've had to make it again obviously means that we haven't lived up to it before. But it's definitely the right commitment. And we think that the commitments that were made certainly reflect a lot of what we've learned in our science about the importance of indigenous land stewardship and global forests as climate solutions. And we're excited to continue working with decision makers to formulate ways, develop ways and implement ways to actually meet this important climate target. We talked, of course, at the last event about carbon dioxide removal and the importance of forests. In that, during that conversation, we drove home the point that, of course, first and foremost in meeting any of our climate goals and restoring a safe and stable climate, is eliminating greenhouse gas emissions. Getting to net zero carbon dioxide removal is part of that getting to net zero and could also be potentially part of actually reducing the amount of carbon in the atmosphere and lowering global temperatures. But of course, there's also the possibility that those efforts may not be enough, especially if not implemented soon enough. That brings us to today's conversation. We, of course, at Woodwell Climate are committed, really dedicated, and founded as an organization to foster informed decision making, to make sure that real world decision makers have the scientific information they need to make the best decisions. And when it comes to the topic of climate engineering, sometimes called geoengineering, solar radiation management, there are a lot of different terms, and we'll get into some of what those might mean as we go along today. But this is one of perhaps the most polarizing topics in all of climate change, which is itself a very polarized public discourse. And we often hear it posed as a debate. Should we, shouldn't we? When, of course, there's a question that comes before that, which is, do we have enough information to even answer that question? What do we need to know? How do we get that information? And then how do we put that information into action to make good decisions? And so that's really where we're going to focus our attention and our conversation today. And with me for that conversation are two fabulous panelists. We have Dr. Doug McMartin. He's a senior research associate in mechanical and aerospace and engineering at Cornell University and his research focuses on climate engineering. He was a member of the US National Academy's panel that earlier this year, this past spring, released recommendations on both research and research governance relating to climate intervention. Doug, we're pleased to have you. Also with us, Kelly Wanser, who is the executive director of the nonprofit Silver Lining, which promotes scientific research, science based policy and international cooperation around rapid responses to climate. Kelly is a member of the National Academy of Sciences Presidents Club, or President's Circle, excuse me, and has served as a senior advisor to Ocean Conservancy, the University of Washington Marine Cloud Brightening Project, and also to the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Without further ado, I want to turn to each of you. I feel like this is a topic that, as I said, is polarizing enough. It's maybe not where everyone starts when they get interested in climate change, even as a career. And I know for me one moment several years ago interviewing someone about the range of options we had with regard to climate change. We got to this topic of climate intervention and this person said to me, well, you have to realize that we're already engineering the climate on a massive scale by releasing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, by burning fossil fuels. This would just be a different way, a more intentional way of engineering our climate. And I thought, huh, well, that's not a way I'd ever thought of it before. And it didn't necessarily change all of my thoughts or opinions about the whole topic, but it was a major moment of reframing. And so I wonder if each of you could share with us a little bit of your path to where you are now, the work that you're doing now, and whether there were moments along the way like that for you that kind of shifted your thinking about this topic. And Kelly, I'll start with you. Kelly, you are muted. There we go.

Thank you, Heather. And thank you for inviting me to this series, it's a terrific series and wonderful to be here with the crowd. Regarding your question, it's a great question because I come from a different sector. My career background was in the technology sector and I became concerned about climate about 12 years ago and started asking questions around the level of risk. For me, the aha moment came in a conversation with a well known climate scientist, Steve Schneider, where I asked him what was the risk of what was then sometimes referred to as runaway climate change within our lifetime. He said, well, it's in the single digits, but not the low single digits. My original background was economics. If you had high single digit odds of winning the lottery, you'd be out buying tickets. If we had high single digit odds of an asteroid hitting the planet, we'd be building the laser array, which in fact we already are. For me, the light bulb moment was we have this risk exposure that's in the near term, meaning in our lifetime, the next few decades. And as I got to know senior scientists and talk about that in terms of the way that emissions reduction and the traditional portfolio of climate solutions act on the system, it looked like we had a gap. The gap looked a lot like what happens when, say in the 80s or 90s when we could have taken sort of relatively modest measures to reduce greenhouse gases over time to arrive at the place we need to be to where now we have what looks like a pretty sick patient, we're seeing signs of instability in the Earth system. For me, the light bulb was this is a lot like a medical problem where if the problem is not very acute, you do a certain set of things. As it gets more acute, you may need to look at other things. Research is really important. So that's how I came into it and where our focus is.

So I also glad to be here and glad everybody is here and glad to participate in this. I'm also non traditional in a way. I was originally trained as an aerospace engineer and I actually spent six years in industry before I decided I wanted to somehow do something that was going to help the climate and return to academia. And actually I didn't actually realize it was Steve that impacted you because he's actually the first person who impacted me as well. Steve was a good friend of mine as well. I'd almost say I fell into this by accident of discovering it. But it may be once again similar to Kelly's experience that, you know, thinking as an engineer, I might use an analogy from car accidents instead. Right. It's like you would hope we never have car accidents and that we all drive safely and follow the rules and all of that, but you still want somebody to work on airbags and seat belts and anti lock brakes and things like that. Because. And at the time that I first started paying attention to this 15 years ago, it felt a little bit like, yeah, this is interesting to explore, maybe we'll need this someday. And I have to say, 15 years later of not seeing any cuts in emissions. And my concern at this point is that I'm having more difficulty seeing how we get through the century without using it.

Sobering assessment to be sure. So before we launch into conversation about what we do and don't know what we need to know these bigger questions. I think it's important, given all of the terms and even misinformation that flies around, to just do a little bit of level setting. I wonder, Doug, if you could start us off. I know you have a few slides and just lay out for us. There are a couple of, I would say, kind of leading techniques that we're really going to be talking about today. Can you just kind of lay out for us what are the options? What are we really talking about when we talk about climate intervention?

Yeah. So everyone can see my screen, I hope. Yeah, there's lots of terminology in some sense. I don't like any of the terminology, which is why I just decided today I'm just going to put reflecting sunlight at the the top of this. That's basically what we're talking about is Earth gets energy from the sun, it radiates energy back to space. If the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere make it harder to radiate energy to space. And obviously dealing with the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere solves the problem directly. But it is also true that if you could reflect a little tiny bit of sunlight, if we reduce how much energy the Earth receives, it will cool down. So there is two broad approaches that have gotten most of the attention for how to do this. The idea that's probably best understood is to put aerosols in the stratosphere. So that's very small droplets, you know, fraction of a micron. And the stratosphere layer of the atmosphere high enough up, so higher than we currently have aircraft that could deliver a payload. But if you put material up there, it's relatively stable and material will stay for about a year reflecting sunlight. And we know, aside from just basic physics reflecting sunlight, we know that will work because every now and then nature does it for us. The picture here is the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991 put something like 30 megatons of sulfate aerosols into the stratosphere, and that cooled the planet by about a half a degree the following year. Half a degree Celsius. Robust effect. Well understood in principle. And so in principle, you could design aircraft and replicate the same cooling with aircraft. The other method that's often talked about is marine cloud brightening, or most frequently talked about would be marine cloud brightening. The picture here is a satellite picture of ship tracks off of Europe's Atlantic coast. So each of these white lines is a cloud, and at the head of that line, there's a little ship. And the pollution from the ship basically gives water vapor in the atmosphere can condense onto that and form a cloud. And the white cloud is a lot brighter than the ocean underneath, and so that will reflect sunlight. And so once again, in both of these cases, we sort of. We know it works. There's more physical uncertainty in the details of marine cloud brightening than there is with stratospheric aerosols. But basically, either of these would reflect sunlight and cool the planet. So I actually wanted to say a little bit about context first, and I'm sure Kelly will say more about this as well. None of these are an excuse not to cut emissions. You have to cut emissions to zero. The challenge is you can't do that overnight. And when you get to zero, you do not solve the problem. That's just when you stop making it worse. It's like taking your foot off the gas and expecting to avoid a car accident. We don't know how much we're going to warm by the time we've managed to get to net zero. But we're not in a good place right now, as you all know, if you listen to previous webinars here, you could suck CO2 out of the atmosphere. There's lots of ideas in that space. We can hope that they will be scaled up and ready soon enough. But they are not scalable today at reasonable cost without impacts. And so that gives us the unfortunate situation that we do not have a guaranteed strategy to avoid actually pretty severe climate change. So the possible role for thinking about these technologies would be, is it safer to follow essentially that blue path or the green path? And to be clear, this is not a magic undo climate change. The point labeled 2 there is not the same as the point labeled 3. You can change the temperature, but you don't change everything else the same way. But at least the modeling to date makes it look pretty promising that it would be less impact than not Doing it for many, many impacts. Okay, so what do we need to know? I'm going to put this as a thought experiment. The date here is totally arbitrary, but imagine yourself 10 years in the future. You're in charge of policy for whatever country you want to be in charge of policy for. We've managed to turn the corner on emissions. They're declining, but we've just passed the 1 1/2 degree target from Paris and it looks like we're headed for more like two and a half or three degrees. And all of the impacts we're seeing today are just getting worse. We're losing Arctic sea ice, Antarctic ice shelves might collapse, permafrost is thawing. And somebody like me comes along and says, well, we know how to cool a planet, but we don't know the details. So what do you do? And more importantly, your 10 years in the future, what do you wish that you knew in order to answer that question? So this is not hypothetical, right? So virtually everything in that top set of bullets is actually pretty likely where we're going to find ourselves in 10 years. We don't know whether we're going to be on a trajectory for 2 degrees or 2 and a half or 3. Does not look like we're going to be on a trajectory for one and a half degrees. So what do we know? We know we can cool the climate. Lots of stuff depends on temperature. So we know the sign of the effect on lots of things like sea ice. There will be changes to things like precipitation patterns. There are other side effects. Like if you use stratospheric aerosols, it will affect ozone concentrations. And actually the coupling with the human dimension is maybe the most uncertainty. So we do not know whether somebody might say, oh, this is a, you know, does this get used as an excuse not to cut emissions? We don't know. What would you like to know? You'd like to be able to say, here's what my choices are, here's what I think will happen if you do that, and here's how confident we are. Here's. Here's the uncertainties and, you know, we've got a start to all of those, but I wouldn't. We don't have a really. The third one in particular we don't really have a good handle on. So I'm going to wrap it up there. And I didn't go into great detail on what the actual details of the impacts are. I'm happy to take lots and lots of questions afterwards, but I'd rather. But I'll leave. I'll pass it over to Kelly. I just wanted to give you an overall framing of where we are, what we know.

Great, that's terrific. Thank you so much, Doug. I think that started us off very nicely. And Kelly. Yeah. Over to you. I think to pick up nicely with kind of where we are with frameworks for doing the kinds of research, getting the sorts of answers that Doug was talking about and then how we might actually put those into action. What sort of governance and policy frameworks are there at the moment?

Okay, working on it here.

Thank you.

Thanks Doug, for setting the stage. The policy in the way society might make decisions about these kinds of things is really challenging area. Some folks think might even be an impossible one. But the context is important. And so what these are is a way of moving heat energy out of the system that's a little bit independent of the greenhouse gas problem and moves a lot faster. It's those characteristics that make us think about how it might help with certain kinds of risks. When we talk about those with policymakers were contextualizing it in terms of the kind of near term risk that we're facing. In addition to what Doug described about some of the weaknesses we're having in greenhouse gas response, we're also seeing the Earth system responses that are moving more quickly and even in some surprising ways versus what was predicted. We have circumstances now where we're seeing that pressure on the Earth system starting to produce changes that could really accelerate climate change, including combination of human activity and climate change affecting weather. Forests are changing from resources to absorb carbon to starting to emit it and emit it rapidly, including the Amazon rainforest which is the lungs of the Park Planet. Similar situation with permafrost. We're really approaching a tough and tricky risk situation where we might need to think about the Earth System being a big part of the problem instead of part of what helps us. Within that we have this different pace at which these responses to climate change act. When we talk about this with policymakers, we really focus on on the different time horizon that they work on. In general, reducing emissions operates over a long time horizon. Because the greenhouse gases that are in the atmosphere stay there. We're left with their heat effects and some latent effects that come from natural systems too. The question is if the risk situation in the next 30 years is severe, what options do we have to actually affect warming in a material way Right now? You may have heard in the discussions coming from COP and from the Biden administration about efforts to reduce methane and these super polluting Gases that come from refrigerants and other things, that is one of the really important things we can do because they're very powerful greenhouses gases, they don't live in the atmosphere as long, but they, they have the potential to help in the near term. Outside of that, our options are pretty few. And so if we do have a big near term risk problem, then we have to think about that. And that's where these solutions that Doug was coming talking about, you know, in the stratosphere and the marine cloud layer, where we take those natural sort of phenomenon that you referred to and we try to optimize that them and do them in a controlled way that we manage as safely as we can. Where does that sit then, in terms of how society might manage decisions around those kinds of things? We worked with a couple of international climate law experts based in the United States to look at what are the principles that govern these kinds of areas in international law and international law and policy. And so one of the fundamental principles of international environmental law is safety. And so that largely so that applies to safety for people and also safety for ecosystems. And so if you're looking at the safety context, that starts to get you into a framework where information is important because you're trying to evaluate the safety picture. Another principle that's arisen more in recent years, and especially in recent years around climate is justice. And how the decisions around environmental responses, both how they get made and then what the effects are on who and how that compares to their contribution to the problem in the first place, which is a pretty big challenge in climate. Then finally, a principle of the most successful international environmental actions is actually how science based they are. You might think that environmental decisions are science based generally, but actually it works along a range of being more rigorously science based and really adhering to what the science is saying to more politicized and more concept oriented. The most successful international environmental action in human history is the Montreal Protocol to protect the ozone layer. That was very successful in protecting the ozone layer. And it's also now considered the most successful in terms of the actual reduction of greenhouse gases by its extension to address these super pollutants. So this particular approach is very science based. But to give you a little bit more on the landscape, there are actually a number of entities in the international policy context where this implies, including the ipcc, of course, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It's not entirely clear today exactly who might assess these interventions and exactly how it might work. Right now, the ozone assessment actually includes assessment of techniques for the stratosphere as part of their analysis of risk to the ozone layer in the United States. Doug McMartin was part of the recent study from the U.S. national Academy of Sciences released in March that looked at these questions too, both in terms of what information do we need to inform decision making, and then what are some considerations of how we have to think about the governance and decision making around the research before we get to decision making around using these things. Just to underscore Doug's point, our information base today is really low. One of the problems is that when environmental decisions are made well, they use scientific information, and we don't have a lot of scientific information. And the science itself is somewhat controversial, even though the science of reflecting sunlight from the atmosphere does pertain to things that are already happening and things that we should try to understand better. When it comes to the science we need to do, which Doug is a big part of, it involved involves modeling, it involves observations and potentially a big expansion of our observing capabilities of the Earth system. And it involves technology work and field experiments. And those things, mostly especially the technology work and the field experiments, have yet to be done. We're starting in a pretty low base in the United States. However, starting a few years ago, we actually had some bipartisan agreement. And even still over the past few years, Doug and I both testified in Congress, actually in this committee that's shown here, where Republicans and Democrats had at the time was considered to be a remarkably rational hearing on climate. And so interesting, interestingly, although this topic is polarizing in some circles, strangely, occasionally it's unifying in the sense that it can bring quite a broad spectrum together around climate risk. I think we work in a hopeful way that if we're talking about risk and we're talking about science, that there might be a path forward where we can bring people together to look at information and to make decisions together. Using the information and the nature or the access to the information is really important. There has been research emerging in different parts of the world over the past few years or decade or so, really at very tiny levels and mostly focused on modeling. But one of the things that's emerged out of this is that the type of research that you need to do for climate involves some pretty sizable technology assets, including supercomputers, including satellites and observational capabilities. And so one question that we're trying to explore is how we can help make scientific access easier so that lots of people in different parts of the world can look at these questions and how we can get more research done so that information is available for us to do that in a shared way. It's probably important to know that as research emerges and as impacts grow, lots of people think that there will be countries that explore these things aggressively and even move to take action on these things as impacts get worse, irrespective of the level of information that we have. One of the cases for doing the research is to understand this with the assumption that somewhere in the world this could be something that people try or that they press to try. We do have today in different parts of the world, as impacts have been growing, an increase in the level of different kinds of weather modification, types of, of activities that countries are trying to minimize impacts. And that includes both rainmaking, increase in snowpack. The US actually has large weather modification programs in the West. China launched a large scale weather modification program in the area, the size of the Tibetan plain to increase precipitation. There's also the notion that emerging from these efforts to manage impacts, we end up with things at scale or pressure to do global scale kinds of things. And so a really good reason to look at the research and to look at it together is so that we're all prepared, irrespective of how this emerges in different parts of the world. And we in silver lining also have started to bring young people into the equation. There are really talented young professionals in the climate sphere who haven't in the past been a part of this sort of category, which has been pretty confined to very senior people like Doug in Western countries. And so bringing these people and people from different parts of the world into the dialogue is really important too because these things are potentially salient to their future. So with that, I'll say that's the starting point. I think one other important point to note going back to the issue that the research base has been really low, the funding levels have been really low. So in most parts of the world there hasn't been any funding for this and in the US it's been really modest. While these things are emerging as international community, we have very low risk that they're going to sort of see been out ahead of us because they take a massive amount of work and the base is very low.

Great, thank you to both of you. Really terrific information and some eye opening insights in there. I'm already seeing questions piling up in the Q and A, so I will take this opportunity to encourage you to keep that going. Keep putting questions in the Q and A feature, please. That's the two little thought bubbles, speech bubbles, instead of the single one for chat. And we'll keep an eye on that. I can't promise that we'll get to all of them, but we will try to draw on those and weave those into our conversation here over the next 25 minutes. Doug, I want to go back to this National Academy of Science report released earlier this year on research and research governance, high level. And you obviously don't need to go through all of them. What were, what were some of the key recommendations that came out of that exercise?

I mean, I would actually say over the. Some of the key recommendations is that this should get studied and it shouldn't just be like idle, oh, we should study it, but that there should be a program put in place at the national level to try to do the research, to help get towards informed decisions. That research shouldn't just be physical sciences. It also needs to have input involvement in, like, how do you think about how you would develop governments? How do you think about how do different people perceive risk, for example? And at the same time, that research should have some degree of robust research governance. And I think a lot of people hear the word governance and they think that's only about how do you stop something. Whereas I would actually say research governance should be about how do you help ensure that the research addresses the questions that you would really like to see addressed. So how do you make sure that the research is good? How do you make sure it's transparent? How do you try to, you know, some sense? It's a U.S. national Academy. We can only make recommendations for the U.S. this is going to affect everybody on the planet. So there's also recommendations in there to say, like how would you manage, how would you structure something to ultimately get towards an international research effort?

Which obviously is something. Kelly, you addressed in your comments as well, this need to make the research more accessible, more cooperative and collaborative, since the effects of anyone should, as you mentioned, any one country decide or one region decide to pursue this are actually global. So having that international base to the research and international cooperation is really key.

Yeah.

And interestingly, it also tends to promote sort of peaceful and effective decision making. One of the concerns, I think, around this topic is that progress in this area could exacerbate tensions. And so scientific cooperation is a way that countries actually work cooperatively and constructively and so on an issue like this, getting to Doug's point, getting those international scientific cooperative cooperation arrangements in place and then facilitating capacity in countries where they haven't had quite the resources to explore this is a really good way or A hopeful way that we might have a shot at good rational decisions here at Silver Lining. We're coming from the place that we don't. And I know Doug says this too. We don't actually know you don't. Doug may be a little bit more bullish than we are on saying, you know, we know, but we know it would cool. We know it would cool. But what we really want to know is, you know pretty well what would happen and that it's safer than the alternative. And those are questions that we want to study really hard. And so. So the idea that we might generate information and then be able to look at that together and make decisions together is a little bit Pollyanna, but also maybe that can work in this case.

So that's a really interesting framing of the fundamental question that we want to answer, which is, would a climate intervention strategy deployment of some sort be safer than the alternative? Now, there are so many variations on what that deployment strategy might be and what the alternative might be, and so many effects. I mean, as we're seeing with climate change right now, the rise in global average temperature is just the. I was going to say the tip of the iceberg. That would be a horrible pun. Right. But it plays out in myriad different ways at local levels around the globe. So how do you take something like, would a climate intervention strategy be safer than the alternative and actually get to meaningful answers? What does that research actually look like?

Have to let Doug start.

Yeah, so there's a couple of directions one could take that answer. I mean, so in terms of research itself, as I think Kelly said, this quite frankly, really hasn't been all that much. So I can say, oh, you know, the models we know it's going to cool. And the climate modeling we've done makes it look like there's a reasonable basis for saying that this could reduce many impacts. Not all do nothing for ocean acidification, for example. And we know it's going to. That some things are going to get made worse. If you do stratospheric aerosols, it will, you know, what goes up comes down. It's going to. There's going to be a little bit of extra acid rain, there's going to be a little bit of ozone depletion. The research needs to better quantify all of those, and it needs to do a better job of quantifying some of the uncertainties in all of those. At the end of the day, you know, we can do better observations after volcanic eruptions, for example, we can, we can fly for stratospheric aerosols. We can fly airplanes up into the stratosphere and do a better job of monitoring transport for marine cloud brightening. You could actually go do an experiment over a very small part of the ocean and actually go measure what's going on. We should be doing that experiment anyway because it would help us inform our climate models. At the end of the day, there's still going to be uncertainty and there's still going to be trade offs and that's still going to result in a hard set of choices. I think, I still think we should do the research, right? I, I think we will know more by doing the research, but it doesn't change the fact that, that, you know, one person might say, oh, you know, you've made my temp, you've reduced heat wave stress, that's good. My, I've got better food crops somewhere else. Somebody else on the planet might say, well, but I wasn't too worried about the temperature and you shifted my rainfall pattern. That's bad. We don't even know what those trade offs are today.

And I want to just dig into that a little bit because you mentioned the models and small scale experiments, although we're not talking about the order of somebody's backyard or, you know, a lab, right. We're talking about larger scale than that. I mean, how much do we have to actually get out there and try it in order to actually understand the impacts?

So for stratospheric aerosols you can't. So there's, you know, they spread globally. You can do a really small experiment if you want to measure chemistry, for example, that doesn't actually need to be more than a few kilograms necessarily. But you, you know, you, you're never going to know exactly what is going to be the precipitation impact over Ithaca, except for modeling. The same is true for climate change. Of course, for marine cloud brightening you can essentially do a full scale in terms of magnitude of deployment over a very small region. And that region can still be microscopic compared to the size of the planet. It would help you really understand a lot of the processes and help calibrate the climate model. It's still not going to tell you again, you know, if we do this in the Pacific Ocean, how does that affect rainfall over the Amazon? You use climate models to project that they're the same climate models we use for climate change and they have the same uncertainties buried.

I think, to Doug's last point, the exercise we're trying to do is to reduce uncertainty. These little experiments, they look at the processes, whether it's putting a plume out of an airplane or plume out of a ship, you get the local atmospheric processes that you can plug into the models. Right now that's missing. We don't have the characterization of those processes with the optimized material we would use coming out of a ship, coming out of an airplane that we can plug into Doug's models to start to look at. Then where does it go? Those experiments in our view are really important. They're really Dartini. We're talking mostly plumes up to the level of marine cloud brightening of a bigger patch of ocean. But you know, but really that, that, that would give us a lot in terms of some of the, you know, things were just kind of making assumptions and then, and then modeling out. So, so that that piece is pretty important and helping to mature and do lots and lots more modeling. That also helps too. Even though to Doug's point we can't get exact. We can look at, you know, ext streams and we can look at. There are a lot of things we can look at if we make the investments to do it. So that piece seems to be pretty important if we want to give ourselves better decision making options over the next five or plus years.

So talk about the state Kelly of funding and oversight for this. I mean, is there a concern, Doug, you already addressed a little bit in your comments, the fact that there's often a concern that if we shift policy focus or talk about this even as a possibility that it might excuse a relaxation on efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions. Is there a concern on the research front that resources and effort put into studying climate intervention could actually cut into research for technologies for cutting emissions or research to understand carbon dioxide removal potential of natural systems or other climate research?

That's a great question. It comes up in the research community actually, especially because climate research as a whole is quite underinvested. Up until the Biden administration, it had been essentially flat in real terms for a couple of decades. And so if you look at just within climate research and you said wow, I mean there's a whole bunch of this reflecting sunlight that is basic science that we should have invested more in what particles do to clouds, what they do in the stratosphere. Those are really fundamentally important questions that we don't understand understand well enough. A good part chunk of the research is stuff we're under invested in anyway. Then you have some of the more very specific things around the interventions. And should you take away from climate research for that? Climate research as a whole in the United States, about $2.6 billion. That's not even a fraction of a power plant compared to the energy investments or the other, you know, climate response efforts and greenhouse gases like this is super tiny. And what we should be comparing it to are the costs of these climate disasters and what, you know, what savings we would get by even fractional better predictions. So firstly our, you know, in silver lining we're saying we're radically under invested in climate research in the, the tools to answer Doug's questions, which is like, can we predict this stuff? And then secondly for climate interventions, that's a piece that the return on investment of understanding that relative to the other costs, it doesn't compete really with the big climate portfolio. It's several orders of magnitude below could compete with climate research, which is tight. And so what we do when we talk to Congress is we say this has to be added on. You cannot take from something else. Great question. You can see I have a passion about it.

We struck a nerve. I'm seeing questions in the Q and A from audience members about other climate intervention strategies that they've heard about mirrors in space or microbeads spread over ice. And Doug, could you just quickly, because we're getting toward the end of our hour, which I know it flies by, but I was realizing why did we focus in on the two that we focused in on and what are those other options?

Yeah, I was realizing there's no way I could possibly we could get everybody's question answered. So I was like busy trying to type in a few answers that I, while I could on a few of the ones. Mirrors in space is going to be way too expensive. That's like, at least certainly in the near term, micro beads on the surface in the Arctic may be useful locally for maintaining some local sea ice in the Arctic. Yeah, we basically, I basically just picked two because while these are sort of the main two that people talk about, but there are others. It's just for example, if you put microbeads on the surface in the Arctic, that's not really going to have a global effect. And there's somebody, there's a, there's a mirror MER proposal to just do all of this with mirrors. So I said you need to reflect something like 1% of the sunlight that reaches the Earth. You would, then you would offset all of the climate change war, all of the change in global mean temperature. We've seen to date. The continental area of the US is 2% of the Earth's surface. So if you want to do it with mirrors on the surface. You're talking about building something of the scale half of the continental U.S. that's basically why those, some of those ideas haven't gotten much traction. And basically that's why doing it in space is just vastly, vastly expensive.

All right, so I'm looking at our time and there are two questions I definitely want to make sure that you both have a chance to answer. Maybe. Actually it's three questions all kind of rolled into one. The first is we've highlighted the fact that we're not on a great trajectory in terms of our climate. We've highlighted what we don't know about climate intervention and some of the challenges to getting to good answers and good wise decision making and cooperative and just decision making. Let's flip that a little bit. Where do you see signs that we are moving in the right direction? Because we always love to give our community more ways to keep learning. Who are some of the thought leaders or where are some of the places you could direct people to learn more about this topic? Who wants to take first stab here?

I guess I can have a stab. So in recent years there are some great information emerging. The National Academies report is one place to look. We have some good information on our website. One of the leading thinkers, Dan Badansky, he's written textbooks on international climate law. So if you're interested in this sort, we have a series of papers that he did that sort of talk about the landscape and how to think about it in those ways. There are some good like brief television episodes. There's an episode of the NOVA PBS program that goes through some of the different approaches, which is kind of a nice way to start if that's how you like to consume things. And so I definitely recommend a few of those. To your question about what's going right to my comment before about in the United States, where there has been cooperation across the political spectrum on a very research based approach, that's a sort of a hopeful sign. And it's also a hopeful sign that there are some young people entering the dialogue. And it's been really interesting working with these. You know, these are impressive young professionals. Some of them are UN delegates. And overall their dialogue and their behavior I would say is a lesson to the adults. So they give me a lot of hope, including and especially on this topic.

I share that sentiment for sure. So Doug, how about you?

I was on it. So of course point people to the National Academy report. But it is, although it is a little technical, we actually just tried to write up a Little primer on srm. I just posted the link in the chat there, if anyone wants to take a look at that and then give us feedback on how to improve it. Just to try to like put in one place some information on what we know and don't know. But yeah, it's ultimately, there's sort of various scattered things. Oliver Morton has a very, very good book that's worth reading. And, you know, in terms of hopeful stuff, I would actually still go back to saying, you know, I don't mean to sound like, oh, we should give up on any other path, right? Like, if you're going to get into a car accident, you take your foot off the gas, you put your foot on the brake and hopefully that's good enough. I just don't. I just think we should be aware that it might not be good enough. And rather than waiting and finding out 10 years from now, oh, whoops, we were wrong. You know what? We're going to lose Antarctic ice shelf and we're going to get 4 meters of sea level rise. That's likely to happen in 10 years. Just to be clear, I don't think we should be waiting 10 years to do the research because the research takes time. So we need to do the research before we're at a point where we want to think about using it. Right now I'm like, you know, there's. Yes, there's stuff coming out of cop 26. It's like, great. We're going to like, make some progress on a few things. Oh, that link doesn't work. That's curious. I'll give you the srmprimer.org right now it's just posted as a PDF.

And we can, we can also share that with folks after the fact.

The website interface is pretty terrible right now. We just like threw it up there.

We have a report on our website that's kind of comprehensive, the report for policymakers. It does have lots of illustrations, so that may be helpful. And that's in the link that I posted in the chat as well.

And I should point out that it's Woodwell that actually like asked us to go write that or suggested we write that. And so they're the. Woodwell is the organization that said we should have an SRM primer. It's just that we only sent them a PDF last week. And so Spencer put the PDF up there, but it isn't sort of hyperlinked properly and things like that.

All right, well, always good to have more information available and I really appreciate both of you joining us, giving us, I think, a real whirlwind tour of where the leading edge of thinking on these issues is, what some of the challenges are in terms of the research and getting the answers that we need, and also where some of the bright spots are. So thank you so much to both of you. Thank you to everyone who joined us today. And we hope to see you all back here in two weeks. Fingers crossed that it will be in two weeks for our final event in our Beyond 1.5 fall event series. So, Kelly and Doug, thank you so much.