Making sense of climate engineering: a focus group study of lay publics in four countries

Victoria Wibeck,Shinichiro Asayama,Masahiro Sugiyama,Pamela M Feetham,Atsushi Ishii,Lisa Dilling,Rachel Hauser,Anders Hansson,Jonas Anshelm

doi:10.1007/s10584-017-2067-0

Abstract

This study explores sense-making about climate engineering among lay focus group participants in Japan, New Zealand, the USA and Sweden. In total, 23 qualitative focus group interviews of 136 participants were conducted. The analyses considered sense-making strategies and heuristics among the focus group participants and identified commonalities and variations in the data, exploring participants’ initial and spontaneous reactions to climate engineering and to several recurrent arguments that feature in scientific and public debate (e.g. climate emergency). We found that, despite this study’s wide geographical scope, heterogeneous focus group compositions, and the use of different moderators, common themes emerged. Participants made sense of climate engineering in similar ways, for example, through context-dependent analogies and metaphorical descriptions. With few exceptions, participants largely expressed negative views of large-scale deliberate intervention in climate systems as a means to address anthropogenic global warming.

Highlights

In December 2015, the international community reached a landmark agreement in Paris to limit global mean temperature increase to well below 2 °C
When the moderators first mentioned climate engineering, recurrent initial reactions were expressed by using the terms ‘scary’, ‘risky’ and ‘science fiction’
Participants claimed that introducing climate engineering might lead to humankind’s losing control of what it had started; despite good intentions to alleviate the impacts of climate change, deliberate large-scale manipulation of the global climate might have unforeseen negative consequences, making the situation even worse, especially for already vulnerable groups of people

Summary

Introduction

In December 2015, the international community reached a landmark agreement in Paris to limit global mean temperature increase to well below 2 °C. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, achieving this ambitious goal will require global deployment of technologies for net negative emissions (IPCC 2013). This prompted renewed scientific and policy discussions about the role of climate engineering technologies for carbon dioxide removal (CDR) as well as solar radiation management (SRM) (Smith et al 2016).. This prompted renewed scientific and policy discussions about the role of climate engineering technologies for carbon dioxide removal (CDR) as well as solar radiation management (SRM) (Smith et al 2016).1 In light of such discussions, many scholars argue that there is an urgent need to assess the proposed climate engineering options from social and natural scientific perspectives (Healey and Rayner 2015). Climate engineering is still largely unfamiliar to lay publics around the world (Wright et al 2014)

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