UK AGENCY SAYS GEOENGINEERING EXPERIMENTS FUNDED BY UK GOVT- Professor Pierrehumbert says geoengineering has troubling implications for global society.
The Advanced Research and Invention Agency (Aria) reportedly stated that real geoengineering experiments across the globe are being funded by the UK government.
The agency claims that the experiments will be small-scale and rigorously assessed before going ahead. Other projects in the £56.8m programme are proposed to model the impacts of geoengineering on the climate and research how it could be governed internationally
The announcement was criticised by Prof Raymond Pierrehumbert at the University of Oxford who stated that Solar geoengineering has enormous and troubling implications for global society. The Professor further added that The UK funding sets a dangerous precedent for other governments to jump on the bandwagon [and] it is the height of folly to open the door to field experiments in the absence of any national or international governance.”
The funded experiments will include sending a weather balloon into the stratosphere above the US or UK. However, geoengineering experiments have the potential for serious unintended consequences, such as shifting rains vital to food production.
