"As the threat from climate change looms ever larger, growing attention is being paid to proposals that sound as if they come straight from a sci-fi novel. One idea is to spray the stratosphere with particulates to reflect sunlight, thus reducing the temperature of planet Earth."

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Svoboda, T.; Irvine, P.; Callies, D.; Sugiyama, M. (2019): The potential for climate engineering with stratospheric sulfate aerosol injections to reduce climate injustice. In: Journal of Global Ethics 15 (16), S. 1–16. DOI: 10.1080/17449626.2018.1552180.

"Climate engineering with stratospheric sulfate aerosol injections (SSAI) has the potential to reduce risks of injustice related to anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases. Relying on evidence from modeling studies, this paper makes the case that SSAI could have the potential to reduce many of the key physical risks of climate change identified by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Such risks carry potential injustice because they are often imposed on low-emitters who do not benefit from climate change."

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Rosenfeld, D.; Zhu, Y.; Wang, M.; Zheng, Y.; Goren, T.; Yu, S. (2019): Aerosol-driven droplet concentrations dominate coverage and water of oceanic low level clouds. In: Science (New York, N.Y.). DOI: 10.1126/science.aav0566.

"Lack of reliable estimates of cloud condensation nuclei (CCN) aerosols over oceans has severely limited our ability to quantify their effects on cloud properties and extent of cooling by reflecting solar radiation – a key uncertainty in anthropogenic climate forcing. Here we introduce a methodology for ascribing cloud properties to CCN and isolating the aerosol effects from meteorological effects."

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MacMartin, D.; Kravitz, B. (2019): Mission-driven research for stratospheric aerosol geoengineering. In: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1811022116.

"The last decade has seen broad exploratory research into stratospheric aerosol (SA) geoengineering, motivated by concern that reducing greenhouse gas emissions may be insufficient to avoid significant impacts from climate change. [...] We highlight two important observations that follow from considering such a comprehensive, prioritized natural-science research effort. First, while field experiments may eventually be needed to reduce some of the uncertainties, we expect that the next phase of research will continue to be primarily model-based, with one outcome being to assess and prioritize which uncertainties need to be reduced (and, as a corollary, which field experiments can reduce those uncertainties). Second, we anticipate a clear separation in scale and character between small-scale experimental research to resolve specific process uncertainties and global-scale activities."

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