Assessing Climate Engineering's Impact on Earth System Feedback—Preprint

[Geoengineering News]

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5132439

Authors

Ellias Yuming Feng

13 February 2025

Abstract

The uncertainties observed in Earth system modelling simulations for climate engineering (CE), namely solar radiation management (SRM) and carbon dioxide removal (CDR), can be largely attributed to the uncertainties within climate feedback. I use a diagnostic metric with formula similar to CO2-climate sensitivity, to examine how Earth system’s physical feedback and climate-carbon feedback affect the climate mitigation performance of SRM and CDR. This diagnostic metric, when applied to analyse Earth system modelling results of SRM and CDR, can informatively demostrate the climate mitigation contributions of CE’s direct intervention and their perturbations in climate feedback . The analysis confirms climate-carbon feedback can enhance SRM’s global cooling effects, while physical feedback such as air-sea heat exchange can reduce CDR’s climate mitigation effectiveness. This analysis advances the understanding how different types of climate feedback can strengthen or weaken CE’s utility, and it also helps to numerically characterise the fundamental differences between SRM and CDR in respect to their climate intervention nature.

Source: SSRN