Next steps are connecting an interested funder, the most competent researcher in the area, and someone who has some relevant engineering knowledge to figure out which experiments would maximize further information to tackle the biggest uncertainties in the model. Mainstream philanthropy will only take interest once someone does the weird thinking and logistics for them.
I would guess ~zero chance of any public funding for this. Professional hand wringers aren’t incentivized to solve problems. If before any charities had already scaled it you had approached people and told them you thought distributing insecticide sprayed bed netting might be the most important thing in global welfare you would have gotten a mix of polite interest and scoffing that never would have gone anywhere.
Edit: looks like I’m wrong. The project is housed at a public university which presumably means it has received some grants. I’d still expect a motivated team to outperform the entire org. Looks like they produce <1 paper per year on average. All the collaborators probably have other things that are their main projects.
It’s worth noting that projected costs are as high as 1 billion per year per W/m^2 of reduced forcing. Still trivial in the grand scheme of things, but quite a bit different than expected total cost of 10B.
And to put that number in context, the “net anthropogenic component” of radiative forcing appears to be about 1.5 W/m^2 (according to an image in the wikipedia article), so canceling out the anthropogenic component would have an ongoing cost of 1.5 billion per year.
With regard to funding, I wonder if you could make it into a for-profit by finding municipal regions which experience periodic flooding and getting the city to pay you to pump the floodwaters up into the air as mist?
I believe global warming is supposed to increase flooding, so flood mitigation will probably be a booming industry soon.
By the way, my dad told me someone at his research lab (Xerox PARC) is doing research on Marine Cloud Brightening. If you send me a personal message via my user page, maybe I can get him to introduce you.
Expected cost of 9B seemed to come from reports on the work of Copenhagen Consensus Center, but, if so, I couldn’t see which CCC document it was coming from, didn’t seem like a salient figure in CCC leader Bjorn Lomborg’s angry blog either.
Between this and the viability of other geoengineering projects I’m expecting that the biggest blocker will actually be how to make sure we don’t overshoot in the other direction, or just introduce chaotic variance.
Next steps are connecting an interested funder, the most competent researcher in the area, and someone who has some relevant engineering knowledge to figure out which experiments would maximize further information to tackle the biggest uncertainties in the model. Mainstream philanthropy will only take interest once someone does the weird thinking and logistics for them.
I would guess ~zero chance of any public funding for this. Professional hand wringers aren’t incentivized to solve problems. If before any charities had already scaled it you had approached people and told them you thought distributing insecticide sprayed bed netting might be the most important thing in global welfare you would have gotten a mix of polite interest and scoffing that never would have gone anywhere.
Edit: looks like I’m wrong. The project is housed at a public university which presumably means it has received some grants. I’d still expect a motivated team to outperform the entire org. Looks like they produce <1 paper per year on average. All the collaborators probably have other things that are their main projects.
It’s worth noting that projected costs are as high as 1 billion per year per W/m^2 of reduced forcing. Still trivial in the grand scheme of things, but quite a bit different than expected total cost of 10B.
For others who weren’t sure what “reduced forcing” refers to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiative_forcing
And to put that number in context, the “net anthropogenic component” of radiative forcing appears to be about 1.5 W/m^2 (according to an image in the wikipedia article), so canceling out the anthropogenic component would have an ongoing cost of 1.5 billion per year.
With regard to funding, I wonder if you could make it into a for-profit by finding municipal regions which experience periodic flooding and getting the city to pay you to pump the floodwaters up into the air as mist?
I believe global warming is supposed to increase flooding, so flood mitigation will probably be a booming industry soon.
By the way, my dad told me someone at his research lab (Xerox PARC) is doing research on Marine Cloud Brightening. If you send me a personal message via my user page, maybe I can get him to introduce you.
No need for him to contact me, better if he came and left a comment here (I’d also be happy to email him and relay the comment)
(sorry for taking over a month to reply)
Expected cost of 9B seemed to come from reports on the work of Copenhagen Consensus Center, but, if so, I couldn’t see which CCC document it was coming from, didn’t seem like a salient figure in CCC leader Bjorn Lomborg’s angry blog either.
Between this and the viability of other geoengineering projects I’m expecting that the biggest blocker will actually be how to make sure we don’t overshoot in the other direction, or just introduce chaotic variance.