Ensuring a Safe Climate

SilverLining Report, April 2019

Ensuring A Safe Climate

A national imperative for research in climate intervention and Earth system prediction.

SilverLining’s 2019 report for U.S. policymakers highlights society’s exposure to near-term climate risks and the need for research in technological interventions in climate as part of a broad portfolio of responses to ensure safety.

The report reviews information about society’s exposure to near-term climate risks and the state of scientific and technical research and governance structures pertaining to a prominentt category of approaches for reducing warming within a decade or two - increasing the reflection of sunlight from the atmosphere or ‘solar climate intervention’,

The report’s contributors include co-authors for the Fourth National Climate Assessment (NCA) and Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports as well as experts from the U.S. National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), Stanford University, the University of Washington, the United Kingdom Department for International Trade (former), and other institutions.

Key Findings

Warming climate poses grave risks to people and ecosystems within the next 10 to 30 years, sooner than greenhouse gas reduction or removal are likely to counter these risks.
Techniques to increase sunlight reflection from the atmosphere might prevent the worst impacts of climate change, but today there is limited scientific information, no technology, and no formal funding for research.
Climate interventions have risks and limitations and are not a replacement for reducing greenhouse gases, which must be restored to pre-industrial levels as rapidly as possible.
Investments are needed to assess interventions and develop approaches for governance, including a decade of modeling, observations, and small-scale experiments and substantial improvements in climate prediction.

Even with aggressive emissions reduction and successful deployment of carbon removal technologies, society is many decades away from reducing accumulated heat energy in the climate system, exposing communities and natural systems to extreme risks in the next 10 to 30 years.

Climate interventions may provide options for protecting the safety of the world’s people and the stability of its natural systems while society transitions to a sustainable future.

“To bring global temperatures down quickly, the only button we can push - that we know about - is solar climate intervention. There are many uncertainties, which is why scientists should be studying the issue carefully.”