6 Session 7 summary

If you were to design geoengineering, you would need to consider the effectiveness of different methods. SRM could give us rapid large-scale climate change but local climate would be hard to control, with potential disruption to rainfall and increased drought. It would also be powerless against the cause of ocean acidification. CDR tackles the root cause of climate change, but is slow to have substantial effect.

A ‘global thermostat’ of SRM geoengineering would need monitoring and control. However, detection, attribution and prediction of climate change always have a degree of uncertainty. Climate is a distribution rather than a single number, so when deciding whether a weather event is ‘unexpected’ or whether two distributions are ‘different’, there are subjective choices to be made due to the statistical nature of climate.

Now move onto the final session of the course: Session 8.