Abstract
The literature on climate engineering, or geoengineering, covers a wide range of potential methods for solar radiation management or carbon dioxide removal that vary in technical aspects, temporal and spatial scales, potential environmental impacts, and legal, ethical, and governance challenges. This paper presents a comprehensive review of social and natural science papers on this topic since 2006 and listed in SCOPUS and Web of Science. It adds to previous literature reviews by combining analyses of bibliometric patterns and of trends in how the technologies are framed in terms of content, motivations, stakes, and recommendations. Most peer‐reviewed climate engineering literature does not weigh the risks and new, additional, benefits of the various technologies, but emphasizes either the potential dangers of climate engineering or the climate change consequences of refraining from considering the research, development, demonstration, and/or deployment of climate engineering technologies. To analyse this polarity, not prevalent in the literature on earlier emerging technologies, we explore the concept of dual high‐stake technologies. As appeals to fear have proven ineffective in spurring public engagement in climate change, we may not expect significant public support for climate engineering technologies whose rationale is not to achieve benefits in addition to avoiding the high stakes of climate change. Furthermore, in designing public engagement exercises, researchers must be careful not to steer discussions by emphasizing one type of stake framing over another. A dual high‐stake, rather than risk–benefit, framing should also be considered in analysing some emerging technologies with similar characteristics, for example, nanotechnology for pollution control. WIREs Clim Change 2015, 6:255–268. doi: 10.1002/wcc.333This article is categorized under: Social Status of Climate Change Knowledge > Knowledge and Practice
Highlights
Climate engineering, or geoengineering, is among the newest and most controversial items treated in international policymaking and research into
This paper offers a meta-analysis of the rapidly expanding publications of climate engineering by reviewing papers on this topic listed in the SCOPUS and Thomson Reuters Web of Science (WoS) databases from 2006 to 2013
The scope of examined technologies has widened, but our analysis demonstrates that climate engineering research is still unapplied and largely only conceptual in focus
Summary
Geoengineering, is among the newest and most controversial items treated in international policymaking and research into. It is an umbrella term for a large set of proposed technologies for large-scale, deliberate manipulation of the Earth’s climate either by removing greenhouse gases (GHGs) from the air or by reflecting solar energy.[1] Climate engineering includes a wide range of potential methods, such as ocean fertilization, air capture, space mirrors, stratospheric sulfur aerosol injection, and cloud reflectivity enhancement. These methods vary greatly in technical aspects, temporal and spatial scales, Volume 6, March/April 2015. Previous reviews have been of three main types: (1) reviews of climate engineering technologies as such, with respect to their possible adverse effects and potentials[1,11,12,13]; (2) reviews of the ethical, science policy, legal, and other governance aspects of climate engineering and public engagement[9,14,15,16,17,18,19]; and (3) bibliometric analyses of publication patterns in climate engineering research.[20,21,22] these publications make important contributions by reviewing the emergence of the climate engineering literature, no review has yet analysed both bibliometric patterns and how climate engineering technologies are framed in peer-reviewed journal papers in terms of core arguments and conclusions
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