From ‘Go Slow’ to ‘Gung Ho’? Climate Engineering Discourses in the UK, the US, and Germany

Unsicherheit als Herausforderung für die Wissenschaft

“…Analysen von politischen Dokumenten (in diesen Studien werden Texte staatlicher und zivilgesellschaftlicher Herkunft zusammengefasst, während wir zwischen diesen differenzieren) machten klare nationale Unterschiede in der Rahmung von CE deutlich (vgl. Janich Huttunen et al 2014;Harnisch et al 2015). Bibliometrische Analysen wiesen einen starken Anstieg von CE-relevanten Publikationen seit dem Jahr 2000 nach (vgl.…”

Reflecting upon 10 years of geoengineering research: Introduction to the Crutzen + 10 special issue

“…Social science and humanities research has investigated some of the fundamental legal, economic, geo‐political, ethical, and societal challenges that geoengineering research and potential deployment pose [for overviews, see Shepherd et al ., ; Schäfer et al ., ]. However, both natural and social science investigation of the various techniques remain in the early stages, and the call for more research into geoengineering continues to be voiced inside and outside the academic community [ Harnisch et al ., ; NAS , ].…”

“…The way in which solar geoengineering research is and will be understood may depend to a large extent on how information about the technologies is framed and communicated by privileged storytellers, such as leading academics [Bellamy, 2013;Corner et al, 2013;Scholte et al, 2013;Hansson, 2014a, 2014b;Cairns and Stirling, 2014;Huttunen and Hildén, 2014;Linner and Wibeck 2016;Harnisch et al, 2015]. In this issue, Caldeira and Bala discuss the tendency among both natural and social scientists in the field of geoengineering to present viewpoints as if they were facts, and in a similar vein, Reynolds et al [2016] evaluate and critique some of the common claims put forward about solar geoengineering and call for more evidence-based discussion of the technologies.…”

The futures of climate engineering

“…Two literatures deserve special mention. The first is a number of discourse analyses on framings and narratives [ Bellamy et al ., ; Corner et al ., ; Scholte et al ., ; Anshelm and Hansson , , ; Cairns and Stirling , ; Huttunen et al ., ; Harnisch et al ., ; Linner and Wibeck , ] and metaphors [ Nerlich and Jaspal , ; Luokkanen et al, ] that map how information on climate engineering can be packaged by experts and processed by audiences; ranging from the need to conduct risky research in the face of the prospectively greater risk of climate change, to climate management as part of an emerging anti‐conservationist brand of environmentalism, to a wariness of “leaving science to scientists” and a democratic deficit in deciding on climate engineering's means and ends, to a rejection of the entire enterprise in light of its potential to perpetuate the carbon economy and its inequities. The (much smaller) second is on earth systems models as an experimental space for gauging the geophysical processes and impacts of climate engineering, but as an imperfect mapping bound not only to limitations in the models but also to the preferences—and even the biases—of modelers in their choices of the type, scale, and duration of climatic perturbation [ Heyen et al ., ; Wiertz , ].…”