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What is stratospheric aerosol injection?
What is stratospheric aerosol injection (Sai)?
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Stratospheric aerosol injection is a proposed method of solar geoengineering (or solar radiation modification) to reduce global warming. This would introduce aerosols into the stratosphere to create a cooling effect via global dimming and increased albedo, which occurs naturally from volcanic winter. [1]
Mar 11, 2019 · The most promising and affordable of these methods is stratospheric aerosol injection, which involves spewing tiny particles into the upper atmosphere. Those particles would...
- Hothouse Earth Or Shithouse Earth?
- A Framework For Unraveling Global Catastrophe
- Directly Catastrophic Impacts: Ecological Blowback?
- Interactions with Other Global Catastrophic Hazards
- The Systemic Risks of Climate Engineering
- Latent Risk and Sai
- Discussion: Building The Policy Boundaries For Climate Engineering
- Conclusion: The Frying Pan and The Flame
- Data Availability Statement
- Author Contributions
Could the risks of large-scale solar geoengineering be worse than the dangers posed by climate change? Many concerns have been expressed over geoengineering the Earth's climate. These tend to centre on solar radiation management (SRM) methods, particularly stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI). These range from fears over negative unintended effect...
There is no agreed framework for understanding the contribution of different phenomena to GCR. Most studies and reports on GCRs rely on analyzing a set of large-scale “GCR-level” hazards (Bostrom and Cirkovic, 2008; Global Challenges Foundation, 2016). Usual suspects include anthropogenic risks such as nuclear weapons, climate change, and more spec...
Could SAI lead to directly3catastrophic ecological impacts? Existing studies highlight a raft of potential negative consequences. But the specific nature of these impacts, and their contributions to catastrophic outcomes, depends on the specific SAI implementation. This is an issue of high uncertainty, particularly regionally. The projected local e...
The impacts of SAI, or any other catastrophic risk, should not be assessed in isolation (Baum et al., 2013). Different catastrophic hazards6 have interactions. One could potentially trigger another and/or worsen its effects. Climate hazards for example have been shown to compromise governments' ability to provide effective responses to COVID-19 (Ph...
Both previous societal collapses and disasters in the modern world are marked more by the accumulation of many stresses leading to failure, rather than single abrupt shocks destroying systems (Homer-Dixon, 2008; Haldane and May, 2011; Helbing, 2013). Seemingly modest stressors can cascade to catastrophe. This section analyses the potential of SAI t...
Latent risk refers to risks that are dormant, but could become manifest during times of heightened societal vulnerability. The most obvious example would be the additional risks that arise in the aftermath of a collapse (widespread, significant, and enduring loss of life, political organization and economic capital) or another global catastrophe, f...
The Means of Deployment
Our analysis thus far has assumed a “default” deployment of optimal conditions of a global material approach to mitigate climate change. This is not necessarily the most likely scenario and the means of deployment and context will dramatically impact SAI's catastrophic risk profile. One of the critical variables to consider is the overall objective of a SAI deployment. There are multiple potential objectives of SAI deployment, ranging from temperature reduction (of different extents), precipi...
Interconnections
Our analysis has focused on individual pathways for SAI to contribute to GCR. However, none of these are mutually exclusive. Each of the four steams overlap and feed into the same waterway. For instance, uni- or minilateral deployment of SRM systems could be driven by geopolitical distrust and conflict. This would likely be a world in which other GCHs are more likely, SAI deployment is less coordinated and damaging, critical systems are less resilient, and the world is less likely to quickly...
Building the Policy Boundaries
Analysis of catastrophic downside risks can help illuminate the contours of what “effective” SAI governance would do. This is a useful complement to the policy literature that has focused mostly on structure and architecture (Reynolds, 2019). We add to the knowledge on policy instruments by providing further detail on policy approach. To effectively mitigate against the (limited) number of threats and systemic risks outlined in this paper, SAI governance would have to be wide ranging, robust,...
We map the different contributions of SAI to Global Catastrophic Risk (GCR). The direct risks through irreversible extreme ecosystem impacts are currently unknown. No mechanisms for this have been identified. But extreme ecosystem impacts cannot be confidently ruled out given the nature of the Earth systems. SAI could have numerous diffuse impacts ...
The original contributions presented in the study are included in the article/supplementary material, further inquiries can be directed to the corresponding author/s.
AT and LK contributed to all tasks involved with manuscript creation and revision, including conception, and design and drafting. AT led on each of these tasks. All authors contributed to the article and approved the submitted version.
- Aaron Tang, Luke Kemp
- 2021
Nov 6, 2023 · One such potential method of climate intervention, known as stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI), aims to mimic the planet cooling effects of volcanic eruptions by injecting sulfur dioxide (SO 2) directly into the stratosphere where it forms sunlight-reflecting sulfate aerosols.
1 day ago · Stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI) is one of the widely studied methods of solar geoengineering 3,4,5,6, which aims to reflect solar radiation by injecting aerosols or their precursors into the ...
Mar 25, 2024 · Stratospheric Aerosol Injection (SAI) is a method to tackle the impacts of global warming and involves reflecting some of the sun's rays away from Earth. Different strategies for implementing SAI can have various effects on the climate. This study compares two strategies—one injecting at the equator and the other at different latitudes.
Stratospheric aerosol injections, based on a volcanic analogue, operate as follows: solar radiation is scattered back to space and the surface cools (Robock, 2000 ).
