How Expectations for Climate, Politics, and Science Form the Solar Geoengineering Research Community

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Abstract

This paper is a chapter of my dissertation about the emerging area of research of a climate change technology called solar geoengineering, or solar radiation management (SRM). The dissertation explains why SRM researchers pursue their research despite historical taboos and persistent contemporary critiques, and reveals ongoing sociotechnical work that they do to legitimize this subfield of climate sciences. In this chapter, I describe three sociotechnical expectations that SRM researchers have for the climate future. The first is the expectation that global warming and other anthropogenic climate change impacts will occur or are already occurring, because of (or regardless of) current mitigation efforts. These climate impacts will cause significant harms which could potentially be reduced through SRM in the next few decades. The second expectation is that there will be some political action on SRM in the near future because of these climate impacts, whether that is a single actor, nation, or multinational/actor effort to consider and even deploy SRM. The third expectation is that in responding to climate impacts and to social-political demand, scientists and engineers may become incentivized to create and deploy SRM technologies without considering or addressing the full range of biophysical and sociopolitical risks and uncertainties. For each expectation, there is a different but logical conclusion for justifying SRM research. I find that although these logical conclusions sometimes contradict, together these expectations motivate researchers who now work on modeling and engineering SRM, and are a key condition for sparking the formation of this epistemic community. In other words, these expectations form a constitutive force for the emerging and growing SRM research community. This helps explain some of the persistence of the controversy over SRM research. This also reveals that SRM scientists are inadvertently shaping SRM governance via these expectations.

Author

• Amanda Sie, Rutgers University-New Brunswick