PNNL

Abstract

The U.S. Senate Appropriations committee, taking advice from the U.S. National Academy of Sciences1, recently recommended commencing government-funded research into solar geoengineering 2. We argue that any such research program should address key uncertainties strategically. In the future, governments may consider solar geoengineering as part of an overall strategy to respond to climate change. Any well informed future decision on whether and how to deploy solar geoengineering requires balancing the risks introduced by geoengineering against the risks posed by climate change. Strategic research to inform such risk assessment must involve systematic, continual identification of the important sources of uncertainty. Research should reduce those uncertainties where possible and develop strategies to manage irreducible uncertainties. The conduct of research in solar geoengineering should by design increase societal confidence in how well researchers understand the effectiveness and advisability of these techniques, including a possible outcome that these ideas are ineffective and inadvisable. Confidence building requires special efforts in communicating the purpose and meaning of research and regular updates of the state of knowledge.