Environmental Science and Engineering Seminar

To reduce the impacts of future climate change, it is essential to cut emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases. But given where we are today, it is unrealistic to assume that these actions alone will avoid significant climate change damages. We also know how to cool the planet by reflecting sunlight away, with the best understood such approach being Stratospheric Aerosol Injection (SAI): adding aerosols such as sulfate to the stratosphere would reflect sunlight and cool the planet. I will talk about why we should be researching this, what we know about the effects, what we don't know, and how to get to a point where we can better inform future decisions surrounding deployment. This requires (among other things), thinking more carefully about how one might deploy, including the role of choices such as what latitudes the aerosols are added, and the role of learning during deployment.