Planetary intensive care: reflecting sunlight to cool the climate

This is a strange moment in the history of our planet - its intelligent life has rapidly altered its climate in a way that threatens their welfare, and the state of the earth system that supports them. We will discuss the risk of heat to the health of the habitable climate, and proposed intensive care measures to reduce it. The most powerful and fast-acting measures involve dispersing particles to reflect sunlight from the atmosphere: ‘sunlight reflection’ or ‘solar geoengineering’. We will review the primary proposed approaches for sunlight reflection and our current level of knowledge of their feasibility and risks, including major scientific and technical questions and proposed near-term experiments. We will set these approaches in the context of the larger issue of managing the atmosphere, climate and earth system, and the possibilities presented by emerging technologies for remote sensing, data and computing. And, finally, we will discuss the societal and political context, including the most recent national and international developments.

Speaker: Kelly Wanser, Marine Cloud Brightening Project