UK’s ARIA Announces £45m Funding for 21 “Climate Cooling” Research Projects

Scientists agree that limiting global warming to less than the 2°C stipulated by the Paris Agreement to ameliorate dangerous climate change and potential tipping points will be extremely challenging using conventional mitigation. Solar Radiation Modification (SRM) methods to counterbalance some of the projected global warming may play an important role in augmenting greenhouse gas emission reduction efforts. ARIA’s programme of selected activities will facilitate careful, objective, and unbiased assessments of SRM technologies, free from any vested interests.

The UK has an enviable reputation in climate modelling, having arguably the most sophisticated climate modelling capability in the world. Future climate projections using the UK’s climate model suggest that SRM could be effective in ameliorating the impacts of global and regional climate change. However, there are significant knowledge gaps that climate models cannot capture owing to their coarse resolution. For example, how particles generated from a spray of sea-water interact with each other and the impacts of evaporation on the sea-salt plume are unknown and not represented by climate models. These knowledge gaps can only be filled by limited real world experimentation. The transparency of ARIA’s research programme, their funding of the Global South, and their commitment to rigorous moral and ethical standards should be applauded.

This is a significant moment for SRM research. ARIA have been keen to stress their focus on ethical and social issues yet have allocated only 4.7% of funding to projects in the “Governance and Ethics” domain. Moreover, these projects appear to be heavily skewed towards engagement, expert elicitation, and communication. These things matter, but without research to answer more fundamental ethical and political questions raised by SRM – for example, related to justice, security, and law – there is a real risk of sleepwalking into lock-in of irresponsible SRM. We should not proceed as if these fundamental ethical questions are settled or easy – they require a critical lens that should precede, and then inform, public and expert engagement. I am worried that the ARIA portfolio misses this.

£57m is a huge amount of taxpayers’ money to be spent on this assortment of speculative technologies intended to manipulate the Earth’s climate. This is because these technologies will always remain unproven in the real world until they are deployed at scale, at which point it will be too late to remedy any harms. Just because such technologies “work” in a model, or at a micro-scale in the lab or in the sky, does not mean they will cool climate safely, without unwanted side-effects, in the real world. There is no way that this research can demonstrate that the technologies are safe, successful, or reversible. The UK Government is leading the world down “the slippery slope” towards eventual dangerous large-scale deployment of solar geoengineering technologies. Climate change is not well framed as a “crisis” or an “emergency” that demands “moonshot” technologies like this; it is not like an approaching asteroid, as allegorized, for example, in the movie “Don’t Look Up”. Climate change will not be arrested, nor its challenges managed, through one-off breakthrough technologies that ARIA has been designed to incubate. This is public money that would be far better invested in enhancing technologies to reduce dependence on fossil fuels or to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

SRM research is both complex and controversial. Sadly, it is now also vital as we drift towards uncharted territory in terms of how rapidly our climate is changing. Of course, the science must be transparent and honest, and must be allowed to delimit both the efficacy (or not) of any given technique and the risks (within the context of the risks posed by climate change itself). In that regard, ARIA’s “Future proofing the climate” programme is a significant step. It supports governance, modelling, monitoring, and small-scale outdoor experiments – the most complete (and expensive) programme anywhere in the world to date. The programme will push the UK to the forefront of SRM research globally and will open up the debate about SRM. There is opposition, particularly to outdoor experiments at large scale, but these are modest and cautious. It is clear that careful thought has been given to this part of the programme. Any experiments are limited to very small areas or, in some cases, are contained. It may be that ARIA’s programme opens up the space for further outdoor research, which comes with significant responsibility. There is a clear opportunity for the scientists in the programme to set the tone for these types of experiments.

Members of the Bristol Flight Lab and I have been funded by ARIA to design and build an uncrewed aerial vehicle capable of monitoring volcanic emissions as a proxy for SRM.

First and foremost, the ARIA “climate cooling” projects announced represent a dangerous crossing of a red line, in that they fund outdoor field trials launched in the absence of any national or international governance to restrict what is actually acceptable. Worse, the field projects funded (as well as many of the other projects) are the most dangerous possible kinds, in that they are aimed at engineering means for deployment of SRM, which makes deployment by unscrupulous actors more likely, but do not address any of the fundamental questions about adverse impacts of deployment. That the generally respected UK government is funding these projects will open the door to governments worldwide to pile on funding for developing disruptive SRM technology, and many of these governments may be even less judicious than ARIA in what they fund and what levels of self-imposed governance they require. The inexperience of the ARIA staff in climate physics also shows in what they have funded, and the rationale they have provided for the programme. For example, the Guardian reports one of the stated objectives of SRM as buying time to tackle the burning of fossil fuels, whereas temporary cooling does nothing of the sort, since carbon dioxide, once emitted, sustains global heating for millennia.

The best way for a society to make good decisions about complex topics is through open discussions, civic engagement, and robust science. The ARIA program is providing researchers with the opportunity to better understand feasibility, risks, and opportunities of different approaches for potentially cooling the Earth, and perhaps help reduce our exposure to future climate risks – and to do so in a responsible way by grounding the whole process in a robust governance framework. The research ARIA is facilitating worldwide will greatly contribute to more meaningful conversations and increased collaboration.

Most of the funded research is about expanding our understanding of potential outcomes through modeling, observation, and engagement. Yes, there are some outdoor scientific experiments. An outdoor scientific experiment (as long as it’s environmentally safe) is not materially different from a modeling or cloud chamber experiment, especially if its projected outcome is to enhance confidence in modeling tools.

In recent years, the US National Academies, the EU Scientific Advisory Board, the World Climate Research Program, and many others have highlighted the need to expand research, with care, in order to make better scientifically grounded decisions on this very complex topic. Time to start.

Our group at Cornell University will work on three different projects funded by ARIA, two of them in collaboration with other groups.