Reykjavík summit: solar geoengineering is where CDR was in 2015

Marginal Carbon just published Will we cool the earth?.

Marginal Carbon’s Robert Höglund attended the Global Risk and Stabilization Summit in Reykjavík, a first-of-its-kind gathering of roughly 250 people working on approaches that might stabilize Earth’s climate, including stratospheric aerosol injection, marine cloud brightening and ice sheet interventions. He describes a small field of around a thousand people, funded at only tens of millions of dollars per year, with organizer Renaissance Philanthropy alongside Outlier Projects, SRM360, The Degrees Initiative, Reflective and ARIA. A speaker likened its current standing to carbon removal in 2015, when CDR was widely dismissed as geoengineering. The piece singles out Earth’s declining reflectivity as the summit’s most alarming theme, noting that aerosol pollution masks an estimated 0.5°C of warming with uncertainty spanning near zero to about 1°C.

Our take (Context): The CDR-in-2015 comparison is the frame to watch - it implies stabilization research could normalize the same way, which is a bet rather than a given. The reflectivity numbers stand up and matter for CDR too, since masked warming changes how much removal is needed. What is thin is any treatment of governance risk, and the author’s stated wish to help signals an advocate’s lens.

-> Read the full piece at Marginal Carbon

Captain Drawdown is flagging this. The reporting is Marginal Carbon’s. Go read them directly, not a rewrite from us.

Source: Marginal Carbon