New IAGP paper published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres. Evaluating adjusted forcing and model spread for historical and future scenarios in the CMIP5 generation of climate models

New IAGP paper published in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics The effects of timing and rate of marine cloud brightening aerosol injection on albedo changes during the diurnal cycle of marine stratocumulus clouds Certain geoengineering schemes have been proposed to decrease the amount of solar radiation reaching the Earth’s surface, creating a cooling effect that could potentially ameliorate future greenhouse gas driven warming. One such scheme, known as marine-cloud brightening, aims to brighten low cloud, generating a negative radiative forcing from the cloud albedo increase.

A  landmark study, published in the Journal of Geophysical Research Atmospheres, states that the direct warming effect of soot, also known as black carbon, could be about twice that of previous estimates. IAGP Principal Investigator Piers Forster, a co-leader in the four-year study, commented, “there are exciting opportunities to cool the climate by cutting soot emissions.... if we did everything we could to reduce these emissions, we could buy ourselves up to half a degree less warming—or a couple of decades of respite”.

The BBC and the Guardian quote IAGP's Prinicipal Investigator Piers Forster's reaction to the leaked IPCC report. 

Climate–society feedbacks and the avoidance of dangerous climate change A new paper from the IAGP Lancaster team, Andrew Jarvis and David Leedal, considers how climate-society feedback might avoid dangerous levels of climate change.

Rob Bellamy, Jason Chilvers, Naomi Vaughan and Tim Lenton have a new paper published in WIREs Climate Change. The article is the first to review appraisals of deliberate large-scale interventions in the Earth's climate system designed to moderate anthropogenic climate change.

Profitable climate fixes are too tempting for rogue geoengineers to resist In his latest Guardian article IAGP researcher, Adam Corner, responds to the recent dumping of iron sulphate into the Pacific Ocean off the west coast of Canada by an American businessman, "It was only a matter of time before somebody broke the fragile social and political consensus surrounding geoengineering had a first crack at 'experiment Earth'."

European Trans-disciplinary Assessment of Climate Engineering (EU TRACE) Nem Vaughan, UEA and Jim Haywood, Exeter are part of a new European project (EU TRACE) on assessing climate engineering, another name for geoengineering.  This new project seeks to draw together European expertise on the physical and social science issues surrounding geoengineering and include dialogue with European publics and stakeholders.

The report from the latest IPCC Working Group meeting is now available. 

The reason that IAGP is an ‘integrated’ assessment of geoengineering proposals is that it includes many different inputs, and one of the key components of the IAGP programme is public engagement. Throughout the spring of 2012 IAGP held a series of ‘deliberative workshops’ with members of the public in four different locations around the UK.  Read more