UK ARIA ‘exploring options for actively cooling the Earth’

The UK’s DARPA-inspired Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA) is currently “exploring options for actively cooling the Earth.”

In an update post last week, ARIA highlighted the publication of three research theses for climate-related programs.

In addition to “Forecasting Tipping Points” and “Synthetic Plants for Sustainable Future” ARIA also published its “Exploring Options for Actively Cooling the Earth” thesis, which narrows the scope of one of ARIA’s opportunity spaces called, “Managing our climate and weather through responsible engineering.”

According to ARIA program director Mark Symes, who wrote the “Exploring Options for Actively Cooling the Earth” thesis:

“The overarching goal of this program is to answer fundamental questions on the practicality, measurability and controllability of technologies that might one day be used to actively cool the Earth”

ARIA, Exploring Options for Actively Cooling the Earth, May 2024

ARIA’s reasoning for wanting to actively cool the Earth is based upon the belief that current plans to tackle climate change are insufficient to meet the 1.5°C global warming threshold target, and that there may be other irreversible tipping points, such as “the melting of the Arctic winter sea ice […] dieback of the Amazon rainforest and consequent ecosystem loss, and collapse of the major land-based ice sheets, leading to significant global sea level rises.”

On the the 1.5°C threshold belief, the ARIA thesis states, “In light of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) assessment that global warming in excess of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels is now likely (even if increased action allows the world to achieve net zero emissions by 2040), and that the pace and scale of what has been done so far, and current plans are insufficient to tackle climate change, there is increasing debate as to whether society must buy time to decarbonize by manipulating certain variables to reduce global temperatures on a short-to-medium term basis.”

However, the 1.5°C target isn’t based on any scientific calculation, and IPCC chief Jim Skea said last year that the world wouldn’t end should we pass that threshold.

“1.5 degrees, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, isn’t based on any scientific calculation. It doesn’t represent a specific planetary threshold or ecological tipping point“

The Atlantic, 1.5 Degrees Was Never the End of the World:
The most famous climate goal is woefully misunderstood, February 2023

Last year, newly appointed head of the IPCC chief Jim Skea said, “The world won’t end if it warms by more than 1.5 degrees. It will however be a more dangerous world.”

And according to a report from The Atlantic, the 1.5°C target was never based on any scientific calculation; “it was first proposed during international climate negotiations as a moral statement, a rebuke of the idea that the world could accept some disruption and suffering in order to burn fossil fuels just a bit longer.”

The 1.5°C target never represented a threshold or tipping point, yet ARIA holds on to a “concern around climate tipping points (abrupt alterations in the Earth’s climate system), which may lead to essentially irreversible disruptive changes on a regional or global scale if the global temperature exceeds certain thresholds for any length of time.”

For ARIA, decarbonization is still the number one long-term priority, but the UK research and development agency is giving serious consideration to actively cooling the planet as a short-term solution in order to buy time for long-term decarbonization efforts to take effect.

“Approaches such as stratospheric aerosol injection, marine cloud brightening, increasing the reflectivity of the Earth’s surface (e.g. by re-growing ice sheets), and constructing space-based reflectors to shade the Earth from a proportion of incoming sunlight have all been proposed as potential methods by which to cool the Earth”

ARIA, Exploring Options for Actively Cooling the Earth, May 2024

Symes’ broader opportunity space from December also included studies involving:

• Blocking the sun as a potential means to cool global land temperatures.
• Solar Radiation Management (SRM) techniques, which “reflect a small percentage of the sun’s light and heat back into space.”
• “Cirrus Cloud Thinning,” which theoretically would “allow more longwave radiation to escape to space.”

If any of the above approaches were to be executed recklessly without any knowledge of long-term effects, the results could be devastating.

According to ARIA, “Many poorly-constrained risks associated with the approaches above currently exist, especially regarding the scope and scale of their side-effects — which may affect different parts of the world unevenly.”

Symes worries that if active global cooling measures were to be successfully implemented, they could disincentivize the entire net-zero agenda.

“Concerns also exist related to moral hazard, and the extent to which developing the capability to lower global temperatures without lowering atmospheric greenhouse gas levels (i.e. “treating the symptoms, but not the disease”) reduces the incentive to reach net zero and/or remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere in a timely manner,” the ARIA thesis reads.

“We see a need for a programme that will conduct small, controlled, geographically-confined outdoor field trials on technologies that may one day scale to help reduce global temperatures”

ARIA, Exploring Options for Actively Cooling the Earth, May 2024

But the scope of the actively cooling the Earth thesis is not to implement any of the extreme measures right away, but rather to explore what type of research is required, and to carry out small, controlled, geographically-confined experiments.

As ARIA puts it, “These trials are not designed as stepping stones to deployment, but to answer fundamental questions as to the practicality, measurability and controllability of the proposed approaches, and where further indoor trials are no longer able to provide these answers.”

Key principles to the trials include:

“A key goal of the program will be to establish a culture of complete openness for field trials in terms of what activities are undertaken and their outcomes, similar to that which the International Civil Aviation Organization champions for the sharing of best practices in the aviation industry”

ARIA, Exploring Options for Actively Cooling the Earth, May 2024

On December 6, ARIA published Q&A with Symes and ARIA CEO Ilan Gur, where they elaborated on the original research opportunity space.

Both agreed that decarbonization and net-zero were “most important to address climate change.”

However, Symes argued that:

“Even if we stopped burning fossil fuels tomorrow and no more CO₂ from human activity entered the atmosphere, the world would continue to warm due to the CO₂ that is already in the atmosphere”

Gur said that he wanted to hear from scientists and engineers on “how we might intervene responsibly in climate and weather systems” while warning that climate engineering experiments could be carried out “without the fundamental science to underpin them.”

“We should also recognize that the technological ability and desire to intervene in climate and weather systems is increasing across the globe,” said Gur, adding:

“There is the risk that climate engineering experiments will be carried out, but without the fundamental science to underpin them”

“The UK is uniquely positioned to advance our understanding of these approaches, towards a framework for approaching their development and use responsibly,” the ARIA CEO concluded.

ARIA is a non-departmental public body, sponsored by the UK Department for Science, Innovation and Technology that bills itself as “an R&D funding agency built to unlock scientific and technological breakthroughs which could benefit everyone” by “empowering scientists to reach for the edge of the possible.”

Last September, founding CEO Ilan Gur said of ARIA, “From a policy perspective ARIA was built inspired by DARPA — the funding organization in the US that really catalyzed entire new areas like computing and the internet, and GPS technology, and more recently mRNA.”

Previously, Gur was a director at the US Advanced Research Projects Agency for Energy (ARPA-E), and on top of being a Schmidt Futures Innovation Fellow, he is also the founder of Activate.org, a US-based organization that empowers scientists and engineers to bring ground-breaking research to market.

This month, ARIA highlighted the launch of funding calls for two new programs – “Robot Dexterity” and “Precision Neurotechnologies.“

A new funding call for ARIA’s “Safeguarded AI” program is now live, which is allocating an initial £5.4M ($6.9M) to demonstrate the practical value of “gatekeeper AI” in domain-specific settings and applications, from balancing electricity grids, to clinical trial optimization. 

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