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Defining success and limits of field experiments to test geoengineering by marine cloud brightening

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Abstract

Marine cloud brightening (MCB) has been suggested as a possible solar radiation management approach to geoengineering the Earth’s climate in order to offset anthropogenic global warming. We discuss the utility of field experiments to test MCB. These experiments, if appropriately designed, would provide an unprecedented controlled environment to not only test MCB, but to understand aerosol impacts on climate. We discuss the science of MCB and review a set of field experiments that has been proposed as de minimis first steps to field test the concept. Our focus is upon issues of success determination, international oversight and/or governance, and outcomes if initial tests are deemed successful.

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Notes

  1. Global Energy and Water Cycle Experiment, a subprogram of the World Climate Research Program

  2. The spatial scale of the perturbations is determined by the injected aerosol lifetime and the typical wind speed. For a typical lifetime of 2 days for near-surface aerosols, and a typical wind speed of 10 m s−1, the spatial scale is limited to within 1,700 km of the injection site. While there could be teleconnected responses outside this region, this is fundamentally different from the geographical distribution of SSI responses.

  3. The term ‘small-scale’ is here used to distinguish field tests with de minimis climate impacts from larger-scale field tests with detectable climatic impacts. In this context, “de minimis climate responses” means that the field experiments have no detectable climatic signal beyond the experimental region, and that any climatic changes resulting from radiative perturbations within the experimental region that are detectable immediately following the cessation of the experiment decay to the background with a period of days to a week or two.

  4. The largest such field study thus far has been the Monterey Area Ship Tracks (MAST) Experiment that was conducted in 1994 and studied numerous ship tracks with a variety of platfoms (Durkee et al. 2000a).

  5. Definitive in this context simply means that the experiment (adding aerosol particles) results in an expected outcome (an increase in cloud droplet number) consistent with theoretical scientific understanding. Negative means that the expected outcome cannot be demonstrated. The terms “positive” or “negative” are not used here to imply anything about ethical choices or outcomes.

  6. In reading through the ethics literature on this subject, one is struck by the struggle to define the concept of environmental risk and the attempt to find relationships between risk and cost-benefit analysis. To some extent, environmental scientists are responsible for this difficulty because we find it difficult to provide rigorous definitions of risk for problems like climate change. Furthermore, the cost-benefit tradeoffs are not well understood and often contain value judgments that may themselves be difficult to defend. Reaching acceptable definitions of risk and costs for climate change and geoengineering must necessarily involve at a minimum environmental scientists, ethicists, and economists.

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to acknowledge the Environment Institute of the University of Washington College of the Environment, which provided financial support for this work, including a seminar series and workshop at the University of Washington in which several of the special issue authors participated. We are also indebted to our colleagues in this special issue for useful critiques of our ideas.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Atmospheric Sciences, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA

    Robert Wood & Thomas P. Ackerman

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  1. Robert Wood
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  2. Thomas P. Ackerman
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Correspondence to Robert Wood.

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This article is part of a special issue on “Geoengineering Research and its Limitations” edited by Robert Wood, Stephen Gardiner, and Lauren Hartzell-Nichols.

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Wood, R., Ackerman, T.P. Defining success and limits of field experiments to test geoengineering by marine cloud brightening. Climatic Change 121, 459–472 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-013-0932-z

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-013-0932-z

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