Conference: 2024 Climate Engineering GRC and GRS

Gordon Research Conferences, East Greenwich RI

Investigators

Abstract

The 2024 Gordon Research Conference (GRC) on Climate Engineering (CE) will be held February 18-23, 2024 in Lucca, Italy. The conference will feature both senior and junior scientists who recently have been active in the field and are leading new research directions in climate engineering research. Scientists and engineers spanning researchers who did some of the first work in this area to students currently basing their graduate research in climate engineering are anticipated to attend. The Gordon Research Seminar (GRS), designed for young scientists, will precede the GRC at the same location on February 17 and 18. This grant is for partial support of US-based invited speakers, discussion leaders and others, in particular early-career scientists, to attend the GRS and GRC. Areas to be discussed include: the engineering and technical feasibility of climate engineering approaches; how implementation of CE would affect climate impacts; detectability and interpretation of impacts, including societal and ecological considerations; and approaches for designing injection strategies and CE scenarios to study the outcomes of different CE applications under different climate scenarios. Research to be discussed also includes improving confidence in Earth system models through evaluation with observations and model intercomparisons. The study of Climate Engineering is by nature interdisciplinary, relying on information exchange and in-depth discussions between different groups, as provided by the GRC and GRS. Climate change is continuing to cause large-scale impacts and extreme events all over the world. Climate Engineering via solar radiation modification (SRM) may be the only option to sustain global temperatures in the near term. However, understanding of the feasibility and impacts of different SRM approaches is still very limited, which is limiting ability to make well-informed decisions about their possible use. Furthermore, the needed technologies have not been developed. There is therefore an urgent need to accelerate climate engineering research, ideally bringing fragmented research areas together towards more focused work. The GRC and GRS are excellent venues to discuss cutting-edge CE research and ideas and to integrate an interdisciplinary group of scientists to move the research forward. This 2024 GRC/GRS for climate engineering is located in Italy, with the purpose of allowing researchers from all over the world, and in particular from developing countries, to more easily attend. The GRS will play an important role in introducing and integrating early career scientists and students into critical topic areas of CE research. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.