<\/p>\n
He says he and his team have completed the initial designs and are now doing more detailed engineering and cost analyses. They intend to publish the findings when the effort is complete.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019d love to build a prototype of such an airplane and feel we could do so relatively quickly,\u201d Langford says. \u201cBut that all depends on what David\u2019s group wants to do.\u201d<\/p>\n
David Keith\u2019s group, CSEi, is still coming together.<\/p>\n
The University of Chicago unveiled the research initiative in 2024 and has committed to hiring 10 additional faculty members to advance scientific understanding of various forms of geoengineering and explore the thorny questions related to policy, ethics, and governance. It had hired two of them as of press time.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n
The university saw an opportunity to step up as a leader in a field that wasn\u2019t getting adequate academic attention despite its potential to address the dangers of climate change, says Michael Greenstone, a climate economist and the founding director of the university\u2019s Institute for Climate and Sustainable Growth.<\/p>\n
\u201cUniversities, as a whole, were committing academic malpractice by not investigating the technical, the social, the political, and the even kind of humanist elements of geoengineering,\u201d Greenstone says.<\/p>\n
He helped recruit Keith to lead the initiative.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n
Keith, 62, previously spent nearly 13 years as a professor of applied physics and public policy at Harvard, where he led the establishment of the university\u2019s Solar Geoengineering Research Program. More famously, he strove to carry out what could have been the first solar geoengineering experiment to release material in the stratosphere, known as SCoPEx. But after years of work and multiple delays, the research team finally scrapped the project in early 2024, following mounting criticism from environmental and Indigenous groups and the eventual intervention of the Swedish government.<\/p>\n
Keith has long argued that researchers should seriously study geoengineering because it might substantially reduce the dangers of climate change, alleviating death, destruction, and suffering on massive scales.<\/p>\n
He says that the overarching goal of the Chicago initiative is to expand the field by bringing together \u201cenough independent professors and other research professionals\u201d to \u201cbuild a community around climate engineering as a broad field of inquiry.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\u201cSolar geoengineering certainly has complex and potentially dangerous political consequences, but so do a host of other emerging ideas and technologies.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n
David Keith, geoengineering researcher<\/cite><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\n\u201cThe University of Chicago was the first big university to try and build this as a field in a serious way, to make it not about one person,\u201d he tells me. \u201cIt\u2019s a giant commitment.\u201d<\/p>\n
Keith himself has become a divisive figure, the face of geoengineering to some. He says he now wants to help build a larger, sustainable research program that will outlive his involvement. He told the administrators that he shouldn\u2019t run the program for more than five years.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s important to have a generational handover,\u201d he says, adding: \u201cI think it\u2019s really important that this not be \u2018the David Keith Show.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n
The CSEi researchers are now exploring nearly every engineering challenge that Reflective highlighted in its analysis. In addition to the work on novel aircraft and in situ observations, the group is designing small \u201ccube\u201d satellites with optical sensors optimized for observing the stratosphere. It is also studying which materials might prove most practical to ship to the stratosphere and how best to release them.<\/p>\n
The goal is \u201cproducing public information which can be independently assessed, critically assessed, so policymakers can understand more about what\u2019s possible and not,\u201d Keith says.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n
#Hacking #atmosphere #Geoengineering #reality #check<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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