Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all.
On November 12, Tim Jesper Suhrhoff posted a chart that ought to change how enhanced weathering buyers read the literature. His finding: peer-reviewed terrestrial enhanced weathering papers are doubling every 2.8 years. Preprints are doubling every 1.3 years. “Enhanced weathering publications are growing exponentially. For peer-reviewed terrestrial EW papers, the estimated doubling time is ~2.8 years (R² = 0.92). Outside formal peer review, growth is even faster: ~1.3 years,” he wrote (@climatejesper.bsky.social). Enhanced weathering (ERW) is the CDR pathway that spreads crushed silicate rock on land to accelerate the natural reaction between minerals and CO2. The science underneath it is now moving faster than the review system that certifies it.
The arc here is unusual. Suhrhoff did not set out to become enhanced weathering’s bibliographer. He built a running literature list, published it on Zenodo, and kept it current as the field grew (Enhanced weathering literature list). That living dataset is now the reference bibliography researchers use to track the field’s maturity. By quantifying it, he turned a housekeeping tool into a diagnostic instrument. The bibliography became infrastructure.
The work itself is arithmetic done carefully. Suhrhoff counted 382 peer-reviewed terrestrial enhanced weathering papers and 97 preprints. Fifty-one of the peer-reviewed papers, 13%, had a preprint version first. Of the 97 preprints, 53% are now published. But conversion lags: “80% through 2024 are published, vs 57% from 2025 and 12% from 2026” (@climatejesper.bsky.social). That lag is the mechanism behind the story. Preprints are not a shadow literature. They are peer-reviewed papers on a delay. And the delay is roughly 15 to 24 months.
His lens comes from a specific argument he is engaged with. Suhrhoff credits Tyler Kukla and Chris Allen for pushing him to look at preprints in the first place (@climatejesper.bsky.social). Their piece, “Moving fast without breaking things,” argues preprinting’s collective value to CDR outweighs the individual-researcher costs (Kukla & Allen, EarthArXiv). Suhrhoff’s numbers are the empirical test. If preprints convert to published papers at high rates, the open-science case is not a norm-shift plea. It is a math problem about how fast a young field can afford to move.
That framing matters for CDR specifically because deployment is not waiting. Enhanced weathering credits are being sold now. Registries are writing methodologies now. If peer review doubles every 2.8 years while preprints double every 1.3 years, the formal literature buyers cite reflects the science of two to three years ago. The field trials shaping current practice sit in the preprint layer. My primer on how enhanced weathering actually works walks through why the measurement questions are hard (What Is Enhanced Weathering? A Primer), and those measurement questions are exactly where the preprint-to-publication lag hurts most.
The bet Suhrhoff is making is that quantification changes behavior. His work will land at the 12th International Carbon Dioxide Conference, whose abstract call is now open (@pfriedling.bsky.social). ICDC12 puts CDR bibliometrics in front of the carbon-cycle community that has historically been the most skeptical audience for engineered removal claims. If that audience accepts the doubling times as a fair description of the field, the preprint layer stops being informal and starts being cited. His Zenodo list also touches the ocean side of the boundary, where alkalinity work like the microcosm data compiled in PANGAEA (Guo, Strzepek, Swadling et al.) is contesting its own measurement standards.
What to watch is registry adoption. If Isometric, Puro, or Verra cite Suhrhoff’s living bibliography in a methodology document, the 15-month gap between what scientists know and what standards accept starts to close. That would be the concrete signal that the preprint layer has been formalized as legitimate evidence rather than treated as provisional.
Suhrhoff’s voice matters for the broader CDR conversation because he is doing the least glamorous job in the field and doing it in public. Nobody gets funded to maintain a bibliography. Nobody gets a headline for a doubling-time regression. But procurement teams, MRV committees, and protocol authors all need a canonical evidence base, and right now his list is the closest thing enhanced weathering has to one. The question his numbers force on the rest of us: if you are buying credits or writing rules against a literature that is two years stale, what exactly are you certifying?
Citations
- Bluesky — @climatejesper.bsky.social — Bluesky post
- Bluesky — @climatejesper.bsky.social — Bluesky post
- Bluesky — @climatejesper.bsky.social — Bluesky post
- DOI-resolved paper — Kukla & Allen, EarthArXiv
- Bluesky — @pfriedling.bsky.social — Bluesky post
- DOI-resolved paper — Guo, Strzepek, Swadling et al.
- Zenodo dataset — Enhanced weathering literature list (Suhrhoff)