May 7, 2009
The Climate Response Fund is a new nonprofit organization created to stimulate and support discussion and research into 'geoengineering' or climate intervention techniques and other activities needed to explore innovative solutions to the climate crisis facing the world.
In the two years since the stunning statement by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment that climate change is 'unequivocal', scientists have found that even the sobering assessment was too conservative and that, in the words of the recent World Wildlife Fund statement, climate change is 'faster, sooner, and stronger' than any of the predictions of the IPCC. Spring is arriving earlier around the Northern Hemisphere, substantially less water for drinking and irrigation is being stored as snow in mountain regions, the ranges of species are shrinking and shifting, and pests like the pine bark beetle are ravaging areas opened to them by warming. As many as one-third of Earth's species are in danger of extinction within 100 years if CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere and their impacts increase at the current pace. Scientists have also realized that the CO2 in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions is acidifying the ocean, threatening coral reefs and other elements of ocean ecology. In 2007 the area of summer sea ice in the Arctic decreased by 27% over its previous low. Scientists fear that this change could be the first step in a dangerous feedback loop, allowing the Arctic Ocean to warm further during the summer, making it more difficult to refreeze, and impacting the stability of Arctic permafrost. At the same time, GHG emissions are now on a tripling track, exceeding even the most aggressive IPCC scenarios and we have learned that much of the CO2 currently in the atmosphere will remain there for 1000 years.
Policymakers have found it extremely difficult to negotiate meaningful agreements to reduce GHG emissions. The necessary reductions challenge our technical ability to replace fossil fuels, they highlight the inequities between the developed and developing world, and they will impact economies worldwide. Even the agreements being considered for the Copenhagen Climate Summit this year would reduce emissions by only 50-80% of 1990 levels by 2030 to 2050 and would result in CO2 concentrations of nearly 700 ppm by the end of the century. Meanwhile, GHG levels continue to rise, implying even more severe impacts on society and ecology, and raising the likelihood of non-linear feedbacks like the Arctic summer sea ice melt.
While the Climate Response Fund urges immediate and extensive emissions reductions, we are pragmatic and recognize that the slow progress on reducing emissions could result in changes that threaten economies and societies so much that greater intervention is actually the lesser risk. Many prominent scientists also agree that we need to understand intervention techniques and their impacts. Over the last 20-30 years, the scientific community has proposed several ideas for directly 'intervening' in the climate at large-scale to either remove CO2 or deflect sunlight away in order to reduce the potential for severe climate change impacts. These ideas have only been considered seriously in the past few years as an increasing number of scientists have begun to advocate for research in this area. In 2008, this interest culminated in a special issue of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society and a call by the national academies of the G8+5 countries for research into 'geoengineering' or active climate intervention.
There are many issues that need to be considered for research, no less for implementation of climate intervention techniques. We must understand how to do such research safely, minimizing risk to the environment. We must understand the ethical implications of such research, and how it would influence current policy debates. And we must understand what governance mechanisms are necessary for research affecting the global commons. The public will need to understand why such research is being contemplated and how it might be conducted. Study of climate intervention techniques must also allow us to understand their costs and the potential for impacts that have associated costs.
Funding for both discussion of this sort of research and for the research itself has been limited at best. There are currently no climate intervention or geoengineering research programs funded by federal governments (although a very small number of awards have been made to individual scientists to run models and/or synthesize data). There are no existing programs to which experiments, that may cost US$10M or more, can be submitted. Given the controversial nature of the topic and the conservative nature of most science funding agencies, it is likely that the development of a research program would require an extensive set of coordinated approvals from multiple authorities in nearly any government. If an agency decided now to advocate for such a program it would likely be years before the first funds were provided to researchers. Furthermore, government funding programs are well-known for being conservative and often have difficulty funding transformative, 'out of the box' approaches. The Climate Response Fund will actively argue for government funding for climate intervention research, but we also believe that relying on government funding alone for research on climate intervention is a poor strategy-many of the most interesting ideas are likely to founder in the present funding environment. The potential risks that we face are great enough to engage all potential sources of investment.
In addition, most national research agencies can support only researchers from their nation. But this challenging research that impacts the global environment calls for an international approach. When researchers collaborate with others abroad, those international researchers generally must submit requests to their own national funding agencies and wait for those funds to be awarded. A foundation can easily bring together and fund the best researchers from the entire world.