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Green and Bold: Conversations from the CSU Spur Climate Hub podcast series will arm listeners with reliable climate knowledge and inspiration by featuring some of the most innovative climate champions in the U.S. Mountain West, from academia, industry and the public sector – all actively moving the needle in climate. Our conversations are science-based, non-partisan, hopeful, and timely. We focus on positive change in the region, and the people behind the change. Through punchy, bi-weekly conversations, we explore climate change through the lens of solutions and meaningful action.
0:00:04 - Veera Mitzner
Hello and welcome to the Green and Bold podcast. I am Veera Mitzner, the director of Colorado State University's Climate Hub. Climate intervention, or geoengineering, can be a divisive topic. It is also a topic that might be unfamiliar if you don't work on climate change or actively follow climate conversations. In the last few years, however, the climate research community has started to pay more attention to it, and new fascinating research is now emerging that gives us a great insight into possible pathways beyond climate mitigation and adaptation.
The consensus within the climate research community still is that climate mitigation needs to remain our main strategy to respond to climate change. We need to drive down greenhouse gas emissions and to do it fast.
And nobody really wants to think about the world where the impacts of climate change have become unbearable and where we might need to resort to technologies that can help cool down the planet. But there is an argument to be made about the importance of understanding these technologies. Shouldn't we find out whether they work or not and what risks they might entail? My guest today is Dr. Jim Hurrell, who is the Scott Presidential Chair of Environmental Science and Engineering at Colorado State University. Dr. Hurrell's research has centered on empirical and modeling studies and diagnostic analysis to better understand climate, climate variability, climate predictability, and proposed climate intervention approaches.
He has been extensively involved in the World Climate Research Program, including leading the scientific steering groups of both the US and international climate variability and predictability research programs.
Dr. Hurrell has also served the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine in many ways, and he's currently chairing a committee to examine the impacts of climate change on extreme weather and climate events. He's a fellow of the American Meteorological Society, the UK Meteorological Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Geophysical Union. Dr. Hurrell is thus someone who has been involved in the international climate research community for a long time. So it was great to have him in the studio to discuss climate intervention, or geoengineering, and the still many open questions that warrant further research.
During our conversation, I learned how and why the climate research community moved towards exploring climate intervention, how climate intervention differs from more local weather modification, and what should be considered if these technologies were ever deployed.
A note about concepts here. We'll be using geoengineering and climate intervention interchangeably. Dr. Hurrell prefers climate intervention and will tell us why. In later episodes, we will also speak about climate stabilization that offers a slightly different perspective on the topic. I hope you enjoy my conversation with Dr. Hurrell.
0:03:22 - Dr. Jim Hurrell
You know, are we going to reach a point where society sort of says, you know, I get it, you know, climate change is really impacting me now personally in ways that I can't, you know, that I want addressed and I think that it's through that kind of an action that maybe geoengineering will be considered as something we may need to do in the future.
0:03:48 - Veera Mitzner
Good morning, Jim, and welcome to the Green and Bold podcast. Jim, you're a professor of atmospheric science at Colorado State University and the former director of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, known as NCAR. What made you interested in geoengineering?
0:04:04 - Dr. Jim Hurrell
Well, thank you very much, and it's a pleasure to be here. I became interested in geoengineering actually only a few years ago, relatively late in my career. I started at NCAR as a postdoc in 1990, and at that point in time in climate science, we were focused on really just trying to understand how the climate system works, how it varies from year to year, from decade to decade, what the role of the oceans and the land surface and the cryosphere, like sea ice, how those components of the Earth system affected how the atmosphere varied and how the atmosphere affected those components and how they sort of work together to affect climate variability.
Also back in 1990 was the first assessment report of IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. And at that point in time, we were beginning to consider what climate change itself might look like. The records were still relatively short, so we could not really discern a very clear signal of an anthropogenic influence on climate at that point in time. But we knew it was going to be a topic that was of growing importance. Our climate models indicated that climate change was going to be occurring and being detectable.
But also at that point in time, because climate change was not a strong signal, there was really no discussion about this concept of geoengineering or intervening in the climate system.
So I was completely unaware of it. That was the case, I'd say, for the first 15 or 20 years of my career. The research community wasn't paying much attention to it. It was all about really trying to understand climate change, and what we needed to do to address the challenges of climate change. And geoengineering was just not in the mainstream discussion. But as climate change impacts have worsened over time, this idea of, if you will, having a plan B in addition to doing mitigation, this topic of geoengineering has really been an emergent topic.
And I guess it came to me, it really came to my attention then in around 2018, 2019, I can't recall exactly, I was asked by the U.S. National Academies of Sciences to serve on a report studying solar geoengineering and whether or not this is a topic that the United States should invest in and should better understand.
And serving on that committee for about two and a half years to produce that report really gave me a lot of insights into the topic. And I concluded that it was something that I needed to be engaged in as a climate scientist because people have questions about it. People want answers. And so I thought it was worthwhile of some of my own time to study the topic.
0:07:08 - Veera Mitzner
Yeah, that's great. So kind of the turning point for you or the point when you got interested in this topic was quite recent. How about the science community more broadly? I read that there was a UK Royal Society report in 2009 that really popularized the term geoengineering, but you've been part of the science community for a very long time, the climate science community for a very long time. So do you see a shift at some point in time?
0:07:37 - Dr. Jim Hurrell
I have seen a shift. It is still a topic that some people in the mainstream climate science community consider as a bit of a taboo topic. And the reason for that is that we know to address the climate change challenge, the solution to that is through what we call mitigation, reducing emissions of greenhouse gases. And Geoengineering is not about that. It's about treating the symptoms and maybe lessening some of the impacts. So with the focus on climate change emerging as a more and more important topic over the last several decades, it was really in the around 2006 or 2007 that a researcher by the name of Paul Crutzen who was a Nobel laureate in chemistry, a very highly respected member of the scientific community, wrote what he termed a escape route essay.
And in that essay, he was articulating that he did not have full confidence in mankind's ability to address the climate change problem, and that we might need to consider the so-called plan B, and that would be the idea of solar geoengineering. That caused the climate community to kind of take notice and say, well, if Dr. Crutzen is talking about this as something we need to better understand, then maybe we need to pay some attention. So that's when, in my view, at least the taboo around this topic began to diminish maybe just a little bit.
Then as you mentioned in 2009, I believe it was, the Royal Society published a report on this topic where they talk about both carbon dioxide removal, CDR, as well as solar geoengineering, sometimes called solar radiation modification or solar climate intervention, a lot of different terms out there.
They talked about it. They defined what is meant by geoengineering. And then six years after that, the National Research Council in the US issued a pair of reports saying ‘Yeah, this is something the community needs to pay more attention to.’ That was then followed up six years later by the report that I spoke of, the National Academy report looking at solar geoengineering and recommending a research program in that area. There were also more reports issued on carbon dioxide removal. So all of these things really over the last 10 to 15 years have really brought it much more into the mainstream discussion.
That being said, because solar geoengineering in particular does nothing to reduce greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere, there's still a large group of scientists who feel like this is a topic that's just distracting.
We need to focus on what we need to do to solve climate change, reduce emissions. And I think that all the researchers that work on this topic agree with that idea. None of us, or at least speaking for myself, I'm not advocating this is something we should do. But it is something that I think we need to understand, because what if we do need to do something like this in the future? We need to understand it. And if it is a bad idea, we need to convince policymakers and others that they should not be considering doing this through the science.
We need to be able to articulate on firm scientific grounds what the facts are, what we understand about this topic. Not be policy prescriptive, let the policymakers make up their mind. But we need to understand it.
0:11:27 - Veera Mitzner
Yeah. So if it is a bad idea, we need to know why is it a bad idea.
0:11:31 - Dr. Jim Hurrell
We need to know what the risks are as well as the benefits. And do that in a very sound scientific manner. And to do that, we need people doing research. So I am an advocate for research on the topic.
0:11:45 - Veera Mitzner
Yeah. There is some confusion about whether this has been tried, and we know that it hasn't been tried at large scale, but there is something called weather modification that has been done, like cloud seeding, for instance. Would you mind clarifying to the listeners the difference between solar radiation modification and more localized weather modification?
0:12:11 - Dr. Jim Hurrell
Sure. It's a very important distinction and it can be confusing. Researchers and other stakeholders have indeed for decades been exploring the idea of weather modification. Cloud seeding is one really great example of that. And the idea is to enhance the ability of a particular storm to produce more rainfall. So if you are in a region experiencing a very dry period, maybe farmers are suffering from the lack of rainfall, could you modify the clouds in such a way that it would enhance the rainfall?
There's been other efforts around, for instance, hail suppression. We know hail causes a lot of damage, especially here in Colorado. Are there ways that we could affect particular thunderstorms so that the hail would not be as damaging as it sometimes is.
Those are two examples of weather modification, but the key thing is those are very local, right? Very localized treatment, just affecting a particular weather system. The effects of doing that are short term. Now when we think about how that compares to something like solar geoengineering, solar geoengineering, in this case, we're trying to affect the planetary climate system. So we're thinking about something that is global in scale. And given that climate change is a long-term problem, this is potentially something we would do for many, many decades.
It's not something that we would do, here's a storm passing through tomorrow to see if we can seed the clouds and produce a little more rainfall and be done with it. This is something that we would think about doing to affect the entire global climate system.
You know, do it of relatively long duration. So fundamentally different.
0:14:04 - Veera Mitzner
Yeah, great. I'm glad you brought up the long duration of this work. I mean, one criticism of solar radiation modification has been that once you start doing it, you kind of need to keep doing it. Can you reflect on that a little bit? Like, is that actually, is that true, first of all? And would we be locked into something that would have long-term impacts?
0:14:28 - Dr. Jim Hurrell
Yeah, that's a very excellent question. And I would fully agree that is a real risk. The precise answer to those kind of questions depends on exactly what you would do. How much would you try to impact the climate system? For instance, are you going to try to counter continued warming and keep global temperatures at some steady level? That's one of the things that we talk about a lot. If we do not mitigate climate change, that means while you're doing this kind of solar geoengineering, greenhouse gas concentrations are going to continue to increase.
There's going to be more energy that's being trapped in the climate system that would warm the climate and do other things. That then implies that you're making a long-term commitment to do solar geoengineering to constantly be trying to counteract that effect, which means you would be putting more and more particles in the atmosphere to counter the buildup of greenhouse gases.
So one of the things that researchers like myself try to make the point is I don't think we should ever consider this, even if we think that the benefits may outweigh the risks, until we, we being the global community, global society, has made a strong commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. So rather than those emissions continuing to increase, despite all of the knowledge that's been produced about the danger of continuing increases in greenhouse gas concentrations, only when society began to bend that emission curve downward, if you will, and make a firm commitment to reducing concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere to much “safer” levels (and you can debate what that is as well), only at that point maybe should we consider doing this for some limited period of time.
And the reason that we would do that would be if the world is on a path toward having much safer levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and that's going to take decades from where we are now because greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide in particular, has a very long lifetime in the atmosphere. But only at that point maybe we could deploy solar geoengineering to limit the amount of warming while greenhouse gas concentrations approach safer levels and reduce some of the risks that come with that warming, reduce the magnitude and the duration of heat waves, heavy rainfall events. wildfire risk, drought risk, et cetera.
0:17:04 - Veera Mitzner
There is an interesting discussion about deployment. And you mentioned earlier that you and most of the research community is not actively advocating for deployment more. Basically, your point of view is that we need to do more research to understand what the risks and opportunities are. But there is already some activity in this space. There was an Atlantic article recently about an Israeli-American company called Stardust that is already looking to do testing at this point, mostly, it seems, or exclusively in a lab environment. But that, of course, raises questions about who should make the decision, who should be part of the decision-making, when should these decisions be made?
Is it okay that there is a private company that is moving forward with this technology without any regulatory framework in place?
Do you have any thoughts on this?
0:18:00 - Dr. Jim Hurrell
Sure. I think you just said the most important thing. In my mind, it's not the research that's a danger. It's the lack of governance. Right now, there really are no sort of laws or governance mechanisms to control how something like this would unfold in the real world. So individual countries or coalitions of countries may decide to do it. Very wealthy individuals may decide to, I'm going to save the planet. and I'm going to do something like this, right? So it's really that research governance aspect that is so critical.
Earlier, I spoke about the U.S. National Academy's report that I served on, and we recommended a research program to kind of do what I do, the climate science, trying to understand how this would affect the atmosphere and clouds and how it would affect the oceans and all this kind of thing.
But we also recommended that in parallel with that kind of physical climate system research, scholars also work on a governance system to answer the very challenging questions that you pose, like who would oversee this? How would decisions be made? Who has the ethical right to determine what the global thermostat should be set at, right? These are very, very tricky questions. The reality is that most of the research on this topic historically has occurred in the Global North, relatively wealthy countries like the United States or countries across Europe.
We're the ones fundamentally, historically, that has caused the climate change problem. We've contributed the most greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. So these are the countries, some of the wealthiest countries on the planet, are the ones with the capabilities to figure out how to do this.
And if we need airplanes to deliver materials to the upper atmosphere to block a small amount of incoming energy from the sun, that's the basic idea behind solar geoengineering, we're the countries that could do that. But we may not be the countries that would suffer any consequences if this doesn't work well or if some what I would call unilateral deployment scenario, someone just decides to do this, it's probably going to be someone in the Global North, not the Global South that does it. Yet it's like Global South countries that may suffer some of the worst impacts from doing this or risks from doing this.
So any kind of governance system really truly needs to be international in character. We need to have all the parties at the table, have seats at the table, and I would say that's especially true for Global South countries. A lot of people in the Global South feel like they're dealing with the consequences of climate change, even though they did not contribute a lot of the greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. And now they don't want to be sitting on the sideline when the Global North decides this is something we're going to do. So they need to be at the table to do that.
I am not a governance scholar. I can't give you the details on that. I just know that we need that kind of a system in place. In my view, it needs to be something that's led by, for example, the United Nations to have this sort of equitable governance structure in place to work through these really tricky issues. Like, how do we decide we need to do it? How are we going to do it? How much stuff are we going to put in the atmosphere?
What do we do if it doesn't appear to be having the beneficial impacts that it has the potential to deliver that is causing disruptions in regional rainfall or things like that? How are all those decisions going to be made? So to me, in a way, I have the easy job. I'm just trying to understand what it might look like if we did it. But getting around those kind of governance issues for fair and equitable deployment of something like this is a really, really sticky issue. And a lot of research needs to go into that.
0:21:59 - Veera Mitzner
Yeah, social science.
0:22:00 - Dr. Jim Hurrell
Social science is incredibly important. All of these issues, you know, affect the public. And the public needs to get engaged and better informed about this as well. Because, you know, it's just essential. We're talking about, you know, sometimes it's called climate intervention. I prefer that term over geoengineering. Geoengineering, I think, can give an illusion that if we're engineering something, we're going to do it with a great deal of precision and accuracy. But the climate system is a very complex system.
It's hard to have exact predictions of what happens. what the climate is going to look like in five years, in 10 years, in 50 years, let alone if you did something like solar geoengineering.
0:22:48 - Veera Mitzner
So I wanted to ask you about different terminology here.
We speak about geoengineering, sometimes climate intervention. I've also heard climate stabilization. Is it the same thing or how do you see these different terms?
0:23:05 - Dr. Jim Hurrell
I think it's the same thing. I think the intention behind this is what's important to convey. So geoengineering is a term that is frequently used. You see that in the popular media. A lot of people in the scientific community refer to it as geoengineering. The National Research Council in these 2015 reports that I alluded to said that they actually preferred the term climate intervention. And the reason is because the word engineering and in this case, geoengineering, perhaps implies a level of control that is illusory. It's something that we can't really control the climate system to the precision that maybe the term engineering implies.
Intervention, on the other hand, is an action that one takes with the intent to improve a situation, right?
And I think that's a better description of this area of research. We are trying to explore if we did something along these lines, we would do it to minimize many of the harmful impacts that the globe is experiencing as a result of human induced climate change. So our idea would be to do something that did not harm either people or ecosystems or the physical climate system, to do something that the benefits would greatly outweigh the risks. But we can't know for sure in the same way that I can't tell you exactly what the weather in Denver is going to look like in two weeks or that this winter is it going to be snowier than normal or drier than normal.
Those are very challenging things to predict. And in that same way about climate intervention. So I like the term intervention because it's more just about what our intent is to do something that we think scientifically is going to have long-term benefit, but I can't a hundred percent guarantee that. So it's decision-making with uncertainty, which is how many decisions in the world are actually taken.
0:25:12 - Veera Mitzner
Yeah. How about climate stabilization?
0:25:14 - Dr. Jim Hurrell
Well, climate stabilization, I think refers to the idea that we could do this to prevent further warming and all the consequences that come with a warming atmosphere, like a warming atmosphere can hold more moisture. So when it rains, it rains more. So think about like heat waves and floods and droughts. What if we were able to stabilize global temperatures where they are today, or maybe even a little cooler than where they are today? If we could do that, maybe we could also reduce further increases in the risks that these kinds of weather and climate hazards pose to everyday society.
So the idea would be to, you know, maybe set the global thermostat at a constant value and keep it there.
The danger is what we already talked about. If we don't mitigate and we don't reduce greenhouse gas concentrations, then we're going to have to do that for a long period of time.
If that was a situation and for whatever reason we decided to do this and we stopped doing it, what we would see would be a very rapid increase in global temperatures that could have catastrophic impacts on things like natural ecosystems. Because trees and plants and animals can't adapt to that rapid rate of change. Already climate change is outpacing what many ecosystems can handle. But if you accelerated that, because while greenhouse gas concentrations have been increasing, you've been keeping temperatures steady, and then you decide to stop, the Earth is going to come into equilibrium very quickly. Temperatures are going to rise very quickly. And that could have catastrophic impacts. and that's sometimes referred to as termination shock, which is another big concern, a potential risk of this kind of strategy.
0:27:12 - Veera Mitzner
You referred to a couple of reports. One was from the National Academies. We spoke about the UK Royal Society report. And some of these reports have been calling for an international research program on climate intervention. Why isn't there any?
0:27:32 - Dr. Jim Hurrell
I would not say there isn't any. So one international effort that I've been involved with for much of my career is called WCRP. WCRP stands for the World Climate Research Program. It traditionally has orchestrated a lot of climate science around the globe. The reason is because a lot of the things that we need to do to better understand and ultimately predict climate requires international collaboration. Think about putting an observing system in the oceans, right? The United States can't pay for all global ocean observing systems.
So we need to work with other countries in Asia and in the Southeast and Europe and South America. All the nations around the world need to be engaged in building these kinds of instrumentations, and instrumentation systems, and then also developing, for instance, weather and climate models that take those kinds of observations and make predictions that they need.
So the World Climate Research Program has done this for many decades, going back to about 1980 or so. And you talk about the evolution of this field. In just the last few years, WCRP has embraced the idea of doing research on climate intervention. They recognize the importance of it for all the reasons that we've spoken of. So they have started a brand new activity, it's called a Lighthouse Activity, to try to better coordinate international efforts in this area.
So it exists. The question is, is it of the scale that we need it to be? And I would say that it's not. And a big reason for that is the lack of government funding to do a lot of this kind of research. The 2021 Academy's report recommended that the United States develop a research program on this topic, in collaboration with other nations.
But the US government has shied away from climate science over the last couple of years. They're also not funding any research on this particular topic. We've also withdrawn a lot of money from organizations like WCRP. So these efforts are there, but they're not of critical mass. It's something that we really need to change.
0:29:57 - Veera Mitzner
What would it take for the research community to pay more attention to geoengineering, and how can we speed up the research?
0:30:04 - Dr. Jim Hurrell
Well, I think, again, for the research community to pay “more attention to it,” as a researcher, I do my research by writing proposals to federal agencies that support research, like the National Science Foundation or NOAA, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, or the Department of Energy, etc. And it's a competitive process. I write a research proposal on what I want to do and why it's important and how I'm going to do it. And the reality is right now, at least in the United States, there really are no calls from the agencies to support research in these areas. And so that really limits the amount of work that's being done on it.
Most of the researchers that are working on this topic have obtained money from philanthropy, for instance. So there are private sources of money that recognize the importance of this topic and they're providing some extremely valuable research dollars for people like myself to pursue some of the research and to train my students on this topic and have them do research on it. But it's kind of piecemeal and it's not, you know, one of the advantages of government funding isn't just more money, it’s coordination between the different agencies. Different research agencies have different areas of interest. And climate intervention is a very, what we would call, multidisciplinary topic. There's the social sciences, there's legal aspects, there's governance aspects, there's physical climate science aspects, like what I do.
And an advantage of a coordinated program within the United States where the different agencies work together is we could, we could really look at this problem from a much more holistic way than we can without that kind of funding. So I think that's one of the really important things. The second thing is what you already asked me about, and that is international research coordination. This is a global issue, just like climate change is a global issue. So the United States or researchers like myself that live within the United States can't do this by ourselves.
We need to be involving researchers from around the globe, from the Global South as well as other countries in the Global North to do this. And then honestly, in terms of accelerating research on the topic, we've spoken quite a bit about how the topic was very taboo 20 or so years ago.
That's beginning to break down, but that taboo still exists. There are a lot of my own colleagues who still feel like this is not something we should be researching because fundamentally is not addressing the root cause of climate change, which is the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. So I think just more discussions in the research community, more sessions about the importance of this research at professional meetings like the American Meteorological Society meeting or the American Geophysical Union meeting and the like would speed up the research. But fundamentally, it's a limitation of funding at this point.
0:33:14 - Veera Mitzner
What are you watching closely that you will you think will matter in the next five years?
0:33:20 - Dr. Jim Hurrell
Well, that's also challenging to answer because there's a lot of moving parts to this problem. We talked about the governance issues. We talked about the need for international coordination and all of these kind of things. I think the answer that I would give to that question is what I'm actually watching are extreme weather events. Extreme weather events like flooding episodes or wildfire events or tropical cyclones, hurricanes that are more intense than normal. These are the ways in which the general public feels climate change more than an increase in global average temperature, for instance.
These extreme weather events are becoming more severe, more frequent, more longer lasting in every region of the globe.
It's happening everywhere. And we know that that's because of the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Scientifically, we can show that these events would not be as frequent or not as intense if it wasn't for the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. So I think it's through these kind of events that's going to sway the public opinion. More on this topic has a greater probability of swaying public opinion than scientific papers. I can write all the papers that I want. My colleagues can write all the papers that they want.
I don't think that's fundamentally what's going to shift opinions about this topic or get policymakers to act. I think it's going to be what we're experiencing in the real world. So the question is, you know, are we going to reach a point where society sort of says, you know, I get it.
Climate change is really impacting me now personally in ways that I can’t, that I want addressed. I think that it's through that kind of an action that maybe geoengineering will be considered as something we may need to do in the future.
0:35:17 - Veera Mitzner
We have a couple of big fires burning in Colorado right now, so we are really witnessing the impact of climate change at this very moment. What gives you hope?
0:35:28 - Dr. Jim Hurrell
So I think what gives me hope, let me begin by saying as someone that has studied climate science my entire professional career, which is now 36 years long, it's amazing to say, is it can be very discouraging, right? The climate science community has been talking about anthropogenic climate change. The science behind it is very simple. As you increase the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, more energy is stuck in the climate system.
So the question is not whether or not the climate system is going to respond. It's exactly how it's going to respond. And we understand that much better now. We understand the risks. Sea level rise - we're melting our glaciers and freshwater sources from many parts of the world. Extreme weather events are becoming more frequent, more damaging.
And we have been warning about this for 40 years now in terms of the research that we've been doing. So it can be discouraging to see that the world is not dealing with this problem quickly enough or at the level that it really needs to deal with it. Mitigation efforts are proceeding, but they're much slower than they need to be. So that can be discouraging. So what gives me hope in that context is that there is progress being made in mitigation. The growth of renewable energy sources like solar energy and wind energy worldwide has truly been remarkable.
The cost of those energy sources have come down quickly. I think many parts of the world are making real commitments to go toward cleaner energy futures.
And so I do have hope that our peak in greenhouse gas emissions is hopefully in the very near future, and we can start to bend that curve downward. The other thing that gives me hope being a professor at Colorado State University is all of the young students that I interact with, the next generation of researchers, if you will. And the change that I see in that generation is they're very concerned about climate change. It's non-negotiable to that generation, right? My generation was something we needed to learn about and understand.
The younger generation recognizes the problem. There's no debate about it. They want solutions. And I guess solutions is the third thing that gives me hope. We have the solutions. We know how to solve climate change. We know how to move toward a cleaner, renewable energy sources, that technology is developed.
Even if we want to do forms of geoengineering like carbon dioxide removal or solar geoengineering, we are very close to being able to deploy all those kinds of technologies to make a difference. So the question isn't so much, do we have those solutions at hand? It's the political will to deal with these kinds of things. The speed of deployment can be an issue. But those are the things that give me hope, especially I think the younger generation who really want to, they're not going to accept the status quo on climate change, I don't believe. So that gives me a lot of hope.
0:38:46 - Veera Mitzner
That's great. And they shouldn't accept the status quo. Thank you. How can the listeners find out more about your work? And is there any way for them to be involved? And also, if you have any reading recommendations, that'd be great.
0:38:58 - Dr. Jim Hurrell
Well, yeah, to learn more about my work. I mean, I would say that I'm just a small part of the group of scientists that are researching this topic. So my recommendations would be, you know, if you're truly interested in this topic, we've mentioned a couple of times things like National Academy of Science reports. Now, that may sound to someone who is not a climate scientist or doesn't have that subject matter expertise, why on earth do I want to download a free copy of a National Academy report?
And the reason is because at the beginning of every report, there's a summary that is written with words that anyone can understand. There's also what we call an executive summary, which is a relatively brief, like 10-page summary of the key aspects of the report also written at a level that, say, policymakers can understand.
So I think that those are wonderful sources for people to go to to kind of get an authoritative analysis of what the issues are and what the research community says we need to do to address those issues. So if you really want to learn more about that topic, there are also popular articles that have been written about geoengineering, about what it's all about and what some of the benefits may be, but also what some of the risks may be and where the research community stands. So I would strongly encourage the audience to find those kinds of resources over downloading a specific scientific paper that I've written on the topic.
The other way in which people can get involved is to be aware of the topic, try to learn more and talk about it. This has been, you know, we talked about how it's evolved within the dialogue of the scientific community.
But I give a lot of public talks on this. I think that's one of my responsibilities as a researcher is to engage with public and talk to Rotary Clubs, talk to school groups, et cetera, about this topic. And every time I have, you know, people become really interested in it and want to learn more. And so I think one of the ways to get it more into the dialogue and, you know, on the radar screen of policymakers is for the public to, you know, become engaged in discussing this subject and what it matters and what their views are on it.
Is dealing with climate change and climate events becoming worse okay, or is this something that they really feel needs to be explored more thoroughly to decide whether or not it could be beneficial to consider doing some kind of geoengineering in the future?
0:41:36 - Veera Mitzner
Yeah, you raise a really important point. We need to talk more about climate change with everybody around us and to raise awareness and yeah, just increasing engagement. And that's one of the purposes of this podcast too, to raise awareness of climate challenges and climate impacts and some of the solutions we might have. So it was wonderful to have you on this podcast today. Thank you so much, Dr. Jim Hurrell. And yeah, thank you. Thank you for being with us today.
0:42:04 - Dr. Jim Hurrell
Well, thank you very much for having me.
0:42:09 - Veera Mitzner
Thanks so much for listening to Green and Bold. I am Veera Mitzner. director of the CSU Climate Hub at SPUR. You can learn more about Dr. Jim Hurrell and his work through the links in the show notes. This show is produced by me, Kevin Samuelson, and Alison Sylte, with audio engineering and editing by Kevin.