Elicitation of US and Chinese expert judgments show consistent views on solar geoengineering

Zhen Dai,Dustin H Tingley,Peter J Irvine,Elizabeth T Burns,David W Keith,Jianhua Xu

doi:10.1057/s41599-020-00694-6

Abstract

Expert judgments on solar geoengineering (SG) inform policy decisions and influence public opinions. We performed face-to-face interviews using formal expert elicitation methods with 13 US and 13 Chinese climate experts randomly selected from IPCC authors or supplemented by snowball sampling. We compare their judgments on climate change, SG research, governance, and deployment. In contrast to existing literature that often stress factors that might differentiate China from western democracies on SG, we found few significant differences between quantitative judgments of US and Chinese experts. US and Chinese experts differed on topics, such as desired climate scenario and the preferred venue for international regulation of SG, providing some insight into divergent judgments that might shape future negotiations about SG policy. We also gathered closed-form survey results from 19 experts with >10 publications on SG. Both expert groups supported greatly increased research, recommending SG research funding of ~5% on average (10th–90th percentile range was 1–10%) of climate science budgets compared to actual budgets of <0.3% in 2018. Climate experts chose far less SG deployment in future climate policies than did SG experts.

Highlights

Solar geoengineering (SG), the large-scale deliberate manipulation of earth’s radiative forcing (RF) to reduce climate hazards, has received increasing attention in climate science and policy
Expert opinions are important because their judgments and issue framings influence media reporting which, in turn, influences more robust public opinions that will emerge if SG sees more public debate (Spruijt et al, 2014)
Perhaps the single most striking result was the broad agreement between US and Chinese experts

Summary

Introduction

Solar geoengineering (SG), the large-scale deliberate manipulation of earth’s radiative forcing (RF) to reduce climate hazards, has received increasing attention in climate science and policy. SG is politically contentious with active disputes about the scale and scope of research and deep uncertainties about the governance of deployment. Most studied published documents (literature, policy documents, media coverage, etc.) to analyze themes and sentiments in SG, but only two (Winickoff et al, 2015; Dannenberg and Zitzelsberger, 2019) collected expert opinions directly, and none used structured elicitation procedures to assess the complex underpinnings of expert judgments. Experts typically have greater access to policy makers than do members of the public

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