IAGP

New IAGP Book Chapter: Deliberation and Responsible Innovation: A Geoengineering Case Study. Authors: Karen Parkhill, Nick Pidgeon, Adam Corner, Naomi Vaughan.

Published in, Richard Owen, John Bessant, Maggie Heintz (eds), Responsible Innovation: Managing the Responsible Emergence of Science and Innovation in Society.
Innovation is at the centre of current economic policy in most nations. Taking individual case studies this book scrutinizes various aspects of responsible innovation and asks "How do we ensure the responsible emergence of innovation in democratic society?"

New IAGP paper in Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres

Modeled rapid adjustments in diurnal temperature range response to CO2 and solar forcings

Climate models from the National Centre of Atmospheric Research were used to determine if rapid adjustments to surface heat fluxes contribute to a changes in diurnal temperature range (DTR) under 2 x CO2 and -2% solar forcings.  

Deliberating stratospheric aerosols for climate geoengineering and the SPICE project

Published in Nature Climate Change this paper reports on the first public engagement study to explore the ethics and acceptability of stratospheric aerosol technology and a proposed field trial (the Stratospheric Particle Injection for Climate Engineering (SPICE) ‘pipe and balloon’ test bed) of components for an aerosol deployment mechanism.

Asymmetric forcing from stratospheric aerosols impacts Sahelian rainfall

IAGP Investigator Jim Haywood based at the Met Office publishes his latest research in Nature Climate Change

Using state of the art climate models this latest study shows how the Sahelian droughts of the 1970s-1990s may have been caused, to a much greater degree than previously understood, by significant volcanic eruptions in the Northern Hemisphere.  The Sahel is a belt of land that crosses the African continent along the southern border of the Sahara Desert and is described as one of the poorest and most vulnerable regions of the world. Here rainfall is generally low and unpredictable. The detection of this link between volcanic activity and drought could be used by policy-makers and aid organisations to potentially predict, and so limit, the devastating humanitarian impact of prolonged drought in this region.

New IAGP paper published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres.

Evaluating adjusted forcing and model spread for historical and future scenarios in the CMIP5 generation of climate models

New IAGP paper published in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics

The effects of timing and rate of marine cloud brightening aerosol injection on albedo changes during the diurnal cycle of marine stratocumulus clouds

Certain geoengineering schemes have been proposed to decrease the amount of solar radiation reaching the Earth’s surface, creating a cooling effect that could potentially ameliorate future greenhouse gas driven warming. One such scheme, known as marine-cloud brightening, aims to brighten low cloud, generating a negative radiative forcing from the cloud albedo increase.

A  landmark study, published in the Journal of Geophysical Research Atmospheres, states that the direct warming effect of soot, also known as black carbon, could be about twice that of previous estimates.

IAGP Principal Investigator Piers Forster, a co-leader in the four-year study, commented, “there are exciting opportunities to cool the climate by cutting soot emissions.... if we did everything we could to reduce these emissions, we could buy ourselves up to half a degree less warming—or a couple of decades of respite”.

The BBC and the Guardian quote IAGP's Prinicipal Investigator Piers Forster's reaction to the leaked IPCC report. 

Climate–society feedbacks and the avoidance of dangerous climate change
A new paper from the IAGP Lancaster team, Andrew Jarvis and David Leedal, considers how climate-society feedback might avoid dangerous levels of climate change.

Rob Bellamy, Jason Chilvers, Naomi Vaughan and Tim Lenton have a new paper published in WIREs Climate Change. The article is the first to review appraisals of deliberate large-scale interventions in the Earth's climate system designed to moderate anthropogenic climate change.