UK invests £45.5m in climate cooling research

The UK government’s Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA) is funding up to 21 projects with almost £45.5 million ($49.4 million) in the controversial area of ‘climate cooling’.

The 21 projects range in scale from £140,000 up to £9.9 million and in length from 15 months up to five years with the aim to “gather critical missing scientific data to better understand potential climate cooling approaches and their impacts”, ARIA’s website states.

Broadly, the projects are split between governance and ethics (five projects), modelling (seven projects), outdoor monitoring (four projects) and controlled, small-scale outdoor experiments (five projects).

The majority are due to take place within the UK, but some are set as far afield as Argentina, India and the Philippines.

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ARIA adds the 21 funded research teams unite specialists across diverse disciplines, from atmospheric physics, chemistry and climate modelling to chemical engineering, systems analysis, oceanography and radiative transfer, alongside crucial expertise in governance and ethics – and reflects the programme's holistic approach.

Weather modification has long been practiced on a small scale, most commonly cloud seeding to increase local precipitation.

Climate modification, or geoengineering, takes the topic to a whole new level as it considers large scale interventions that may limit global warming. One of these is carbon removal, which is already being practised, but the other, solar radiation modification, either by blocking its entry or reflecting a portion back into space, is yet to be implemented and is the least understood and most controversial.

Underlying are ethical aspects and, in particular, the risk of unintended consequences. However, climate modification is seeing increasing research activity.

For example, the Geoengineering Monitor produced by the ETC Group, Biofuelwatch and Heinrich Boell Foundation details over 1,700 entries, referring to what it calls an “alarming expansion of geoengineering experiments and commercial-scale projects”.

The ARIA – backing its programme with £56.8 million – argues that the current warming trajectory makes a number of climate tipping points, i.e. abrupt changes in the Earth system that could have irreversible consequences, distinctly possible over the next century.

But there is a knowledge gap in how to avert or delay such a tipping point and its climate cooling programme is aimed to gather data towards better understanding climate intervention approaches.

For governance, an oversight committee has been put in place, under the chairmanship of Piers Forster, Professor of Physical Climate Change at the University of Leeds and interim chair of the UK Climate Change Committee.

There isn’t space to detail all 21 projects but perhaps most interesting to record are the potential outdoor experiments as a guide to where thinking is on this.

One is rethicken Arctic sea ice in a location in Canada by pumping seawater beneath existing ice and spreading it on top, where it should freeze quickly to create thicker ice patches.

Another proposal is to enhance cloud reflectivity using a spray of seawater. One project is potentially to be experimented over Australia’s Great Barrier Reef while another is likely in a yet to be determined location in UK.

Another UK proposal is to investigate using an electric charge instead of seawater for cloud brightening.

The fifth project in this category is a joint UK-USA initiative to test the behaviour of non-sulphate materials in the stratosphere from balloons from one or both countries, with the aim to advance understanding of potential stratospheric aerosol injection.