https://meetingorganizer.copernicus.org/EGU22/EGU22-7797.html

Governance and science implications of low environmental impact outdoors
solar radiation management experiments

Gideon Futerman, Martin Janssens, Iris de Vries, John Dykema, Andy Parker,
and Hugh Hunt

There are many uncertainties surrounding solar radiation management (SRM),
which cannot all be quantified and reduced using models, laboratory
experiments or observations of natural analogs such as volcanic eruptions,
ship tracks, or dust storms. While there is broad consensus both in- and
outside the scientific community that better understanding of the climate
system is beneficial to policy makers and society, the value of improved
knowledge of SRM has been highly controversial. Yet, it is evident that SRM
research can contribute to quantifying and reducing important uncertainties
pertaining to fundamental knowledge on the workings of the Earth system,
while also providing essential specific knowledge on positive and negative
impacts of SRM to inform future decisions.

In 2016, a group of SRM experts gathered at the Institute for advanced
sustainability studies in Potsdam for a workshop to formulate a set of low
environmental impact SRM experiment proposals. We present these as a
non-exhaustive set of possible experiments with no measurable environmental
side effects that could provide valuable information that cannot be
obtained from models or lab experiments. Both perturbative and
non-perturbative experiments are proposed for different SRM methods
including marine cloud brightening, stratospheric aerosol injection and
cirrus cloud thinning.

It was found that in the time period between 2016 and now several of the
research questions addressed in the experiment proposals have been answered
by unrelated experimental environmental science studies, whereas no
experimental studies have been carried out in the context of SRM. This
finding shows that there is significant overlap in high priority research
questions and outcomes of non-SRM and SRM environmental research. In
addition, it shows that non-controversial environmental science experiments
can provide similar SRM-relevant knowledge as dedicated SRM-experiments.
Given that one of the main arguments against SRM research is the potential
danger of the acquired knowledge, the finding that obtained knowledge of
non-SRM and SRM experiments can be similar raises the question which effect
the declared relationship to SRM on outdoors research proposal review and
regulation should be.

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