PNNL

Abstract

While reducing anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions remains the most essential element of any strategy to manage climate change risk, it is also in principle possible to directly cool the climate by reflecting some sunlight back to space. Possible such \climate engineering" approaches include adding aerosols to the stratosphere or marine cloud brightening. Assessing whether these ideas could reduce risk requires a broad multidisciplinary research eort spanning climate science, social sciences, and governance. However, if such strategies were ever used, the effort would also constitute one of the most critical engineering design and control challenges ever considered: making real-time decisions for a highly uncertain and nonlinear dynamic system with many input variables, many measurements, and vastly more internal degrees of freedom whose dynamics span a wide range of timescales. We provide a review of the engineering and design aspects of climate engineering, discussing both progress to date and remaining challenges that will need to be addressed.