Geoengineering
Riccardo Rebonato
EDHEC Business School – EDHEC Risk Institute
1/30
Outline of Session
Plan of the Session
What Is Geoengineering?
Advantages of SRM
Dangers with SAI
The Way Forward
2/30
Plan of the Session
In this session we mainly focus on one aspect of geoengineering –
ie, increased scattering by stratospheric aerosols.
We want to understand
▶ how it works;
▶ how much it costs;
▶ how long it takes to be active;
▶ what the dangers are.
3/30
Plan of the Session
There are other forms of geoengineering. We will look briefly
▶ at how they work;
▶ why they are less studied.
The main source for the material is the UN report
“One Atmosphere: An independent expert review on Solar
Radiation Modification research and deployment” – recommended.
4/30
What Is Geoengineering?
▶ There are different forms of geoengineering.
▶ We mainly look at Solar Radiation Modification.
▶ There is also Marine Cloud Brightening – brightening of low
clouds over the ocean; and
▶ Cirrus Cloud Thinning - allows more infrared to escape to
space.
▶ See Fig 1.
5/30
Figure 1: Different forms of geoengineering.
6/30
What Is Geoengineering?
Cirrus Cloud Thinning
▶ Like all clouds, cirrus clouds are high cold ice that both reflect
sunlight and absorb warming infrared radiation.
▶ On average, infrared absorption outweighs sunlight reflection,
resulting in a net warming effect on the climate.
▶ The 2021 IPCC report has a proposal “to reduce the amount
of cirrus clouds by injecting ice nucleating substances in the
upper troposphere”.
▶ Low confidence.
7/30
What Is Geoengineering?
Marine Cloud Brightening
▶ The idea behind Marine cloud brightening is to make clouds
brighter, thereby increasing albedo.
▶ All clouds reflect significantly.
▶ Clouds with smaller droplets are more reflective.
▶ The key idea is to add aerosols to atmospheric locations
where clouds form.
▶ These would then act as cloud condensation nuclei, increasing
the cloud albedo.
▶ Sea clouds have low cloud condensation nuclei due to lower
levels of at sea, so marine cloud brightening would be more
effective over the ocean than over land.
8/30
What Is Geoengineering?
Marine Cloud Brightening
▶ Modelling evidence still limited.
▶ One study estimated that MCB could produce 3.7 W/m2 of
negative forcing.
▶ This is huge: it would correspond to an estimated 3 degrees
Celsius, although models have indicated less capacity.
9/30
What Is Geoengineering?
Marine Cloud Brightening
▶ “A 2020 study found a substantial increase in cloud
reflectivity from shipping in southeast Atlantic basin,
suggesting that a regional-scale test of MCB in
stratocumulus-dominated regions could be successful.
▶ The climatic impacts of marine cloud brightening would be
rapidly responsive and reversible.
▶ If the brightening activity were to change in intensity, or stop
altogether, then the clouds’ brightness would respond within a
few days to weeks, as the cloud condensation nuclei particles
precipitate naturally.” (Source: Wikipedia)
10/30
What Is Geoengineering?
Stratospheric Aerosol Injection
▶ SAI involves injecting highly reflective sub-micron-size
particles into the stratosphere.
▶ The particles would be released from aircraft that will need to
reach altitudes of 20–25 km. See Fig 2.
▶ We have had ‘natural experiments’: the eruption of Mount
Pinatubo in 1991. See Figs 3 and 4.
11/30
What Is Geoengineering?
Stratospheric Aerosol Injection
▶ Major volcanic eruptions, which introduce large amounts of
sulphate particles into the stratosphere, provide a natural
analogue for SRM deployment.
▶ The 1991 Mount Pinatubo eruption caused global
annual-mean cooling of about 0.4 C in the next 2 years.
▶ An SAI deployment would inject aerosols continuously into
the stratosphere.
▶ Continuous injection rates of 8–16 Tg of sulphur dioxide
(SO2) per year (the equivalent of one Mount Pinatubo per
year) would reduce global mean temperature by 1 C.
▶ An operational SAI deployment could be scaled up to produce
global cooling of 2–5C, albeit with diminishing returns at
higher rates of injections.
12/30
Figure 2: The mechanics of Stratospheric Aerosol Injection.
13/30
Figure 3: The eruption of Mount Pinatubo in 1991.
14/30
Figure 4: Global cooling in the years following Mount Pinatubo volcanic eruption in
1991. Eruption is marked by the blue line.
15/30
What Is Geoengineering?
Geoengineering can be used in different ways:
▶ As a complete or partial substitution of mitigation of GHGs.
▶ As a complement mitigation of GHGs.
▶ As a tool to ‘shave off’ the peak in temperature.
▶ As a Plan B resource when everything else has failed.
See Fig 5.
16/30
Figure 5: Different uses of geoengineering.
17/30
Advantages of SRM
▶ An operational SRM deployment is the only known approach
that could be deliberately implemented to cool the Earth
within a few years.
▶ An approximate 2 per cent decrease in the amount of sunlight
absorbed by the planet (approx. 4 Wm−2 ) would be sufficient
to offset the warming from a doubling of CO2.
18/30
Advantages of SRM
▶ The technology to inject large quantities of aerosol at the
required altitude does not exist, but no show-stopping
technical hurdles have been identified.
▶ Some scientists think that SAI deployment technology could
be developed in under ten years.
▶ The lowest cost of SAI deployment is estimated to be in the
order of about 20 billion USD per year per 1°C of cooling.
Really low!
▶ If only France (or the UK) financed this cost, it would
translate in a tax of EUR 350/person/year (or
$60/person/year for US alone).
▶ The UK government paid 50 billion GPB to bail out RBS!
19/30
Advantages of SRM
▶ As Fig 4 suggests, an SRM deployment could produce a
substantial reduction in radiative forcing in as little as one
year.
▶ Climate model results indicate that an operational SRM
deployment could fully or partially offset the global mean
warming caused by anthropogenic GHG emissions and reduce
some climate change hazards in most regions. See Figs 6 and
7.
▶ There could be substantial residual or possible
overcompensating climate change at regional scales and
seasonal timescales.
20/30
Figure 6: The possible impact of SAI for a doubling of CO2 concentration. P-E is
precipitation minus evapotranspiration.
21/30
Figure 7: The possible impact of SAI for a doubling of CO2 concentration. P-E is
precipitation minus evapotranspiration.
22/30
Dangers with SAI
If SAI is so effective and cheap why don’t we do it tomorrow?
And why do we bother with abatement?
▶ Some of the dangers of SAI depend on how it is used – see
Fig 5.
▶ SAI deployments that aim to offset global mean warming fully
with a uniform aerosol layer could lead to overcompensated
regional cooling in the tropics and residual warming in the
polar regions. See Fig 6.
23/30
Dangers with SAI
▶ An SAI deployment is expected to interfere with some of the
natural modes of climate variability, such as the El Nino
Southern Oscillation (ENSO), North Atlantic Oscillation
(NAO), the Quasi-biennial oscillation (QBO), and other.
▶ Model results indicate that an SAI deployment using highly
reflective sulphates (which also absorb substantial amount of
shortwave radiation) could cause a more positive phase of the
NAO, with more precipitation and devastating floods in parts
of Northern Europe and severe droughts over parts of the
Mediterranean. item High uncertainty.
24/30
Dangers with SAI
▶ SAI must be applied continuously. If we stop, the temperature
increases again as quickly as it went down, giving zero time
for adaptation.
▶ Using SAI to totally offset a BAU emission pattern is
dangerous
1. because of the scale of the SAI required (with
overcompensation and more severe ‘side-effects’);
2. because of what would happen if, for any reason, we stopped.
25/30
Dangers with SAI
▶ SRM deployment would need to be continuously maintained
for decades or longer.
▶ A sustained large-scale operational SAI deployment could be
highly disruptive to the lower and middle stratosphere with
unknown consequences for the environment on and near
Earth’s surface.
▶ The deployment of SAI would affect stratospheric chemistry
and dynamics.
▶ SAI impacts on stratospheric ozone are driven by increases in
aerosol surface area in the stratosphere.
▶ Stratospheric ozone depletion would be increased in the polar
stratosphere, the Antarctic ozone hole recovery could be
delayed by a couple of decades and the ozone hole could
become deeper in the first decade of SAI deployment.
26/30
Dangers with SAI
▶ Moral hazard.
▶ Discuss.
27/30
Dangers with SAI
▶ The fact that SAI is so cheap it good and bad.
▶ A medium-size country could ‘go it alone’ – but the effect are
global.
▶ Even a large private corporation would have the budget for a
medium-large SAI deployment.
▶ Who can monitor this?
▶ What kind of majority is needed to decide whether to do it,
and in what scale?
▶ In what forum?
28/30
The Way Forward
Three types of SRM activities and their governance
▶ Indoor SRM research: research activities such as theoretical
analyses, estimates of SRM effectiveness and costs, climate
model simulations of SRM approaches.
▶ Small-scale outdoor SRM experiments: field experiments
conducted outdoors to study processes such as aerosol
microphysics, chemistry, aerosol-cloud interaction and
transport. The typical spatial and temporal scale of
experiments proposed to date are meters to 100 km and
minutes to about 10 days.
29/30
The Way Forward
Three types of SRM activities and their governance [ctd]
▶ Large-scale outdoor SRM experiments: deployments
would last for many years to decades and produce a
detectable climate effect. In the case of stratospheric aerosol
injection (SAI), the injection of a few megatons of sulphates
per year into the stratosphere an extended period might be
considered the threshold for deployment as sporadic explosive
volcanic eruptions release megatons of sulphur dioxide (SO2)
into the stratosphere and cool the planet by a few tenths of
1C. (Technology for this does not exist yet.)
30/30