Solar geoengineering

Over the next two decades, I returned periodically to solar geoengineering in discussions and occasional publications—most notably in 2000 with Geoengineering the Climate: History and Prospect. But for most of the 90’s and early 00’s, my SRM work remained a sideline to my work on atmospheric science and energy decarbonization.  

That began to change in 2009, when I began collaborating with Timo Goeschl and others at the University of Heidelberg, in Germany. That work led to a joint Heidelberg-University of Calgary summer schools on solar geoengineering, held first in Heidelberg and then in Banff and at Oxford. I am proud that these summer schools played a key early role in building an inclusive interdisciplinary research community on SRM.  

I decided to focus on solar geoengineering when I moved from UCalgary to Harvard in 2010. I’d become convinced that the topic deserved serious study—something that would be possible thanks to Harvard’s breadth of earth science and policy expertise. Highlights of my work since then include:  

• Leading the development of Harvard’s Solar Geoengineering Research Program. We raised more than $20 million, which was used to fund a wide variety of research projects across Harvard under the guidance of an interdisciplinary faculty committee. This was probably the first SRM research program to be approved and managed as a university-wide effort rather than a single professor’s research program.   
• Working with Doug MacMartin and then with Alan Robock to initiate the Gordon Conference on Climate Engineering. Gordon conferences have been held since 1931 and are often the premier conference in a scientific field. Securing approval from the Gordon organization was a marker of SRM’s gradual emergence as a legitimate sub-field of climate science.   
• Working with Jim Anderson and then with Frank Keutsch to develop plans and hardware for the Stratospheric Controlled Perturbation Experiment (SCoPEx). The work grew out of Jim’s leadership in experimental stratosphere science and my experience as Jim’s Postdoc in the ’90 building stratospheric instruments. The experiment was cancelled in 2024.   
• Establishing the Climate Systems Engineering initiative at the University of Chicago in 2023. I moved to UChicago because it was the first major research university to commit to hire a substantial number of faculty with the goal of establish climate engineering as a field.