Solar Geo-engineering

by Raymond Pierrehumbert

(University of Oxford, Dept. of Physics and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Earth Atmosphere and Planetary Science)

Date: Wednesday June 17, 2026 16:00-17:00 CEST

Abstract: There is now a tsunami of government and private funding pouring into developing solar geoengineering technology.  Much, perhaps most, of this research is especially harmful because it aims to develop the technology for deployment rather than answering fundamental scientific questions about what a world with deployed solar geoengineering would be like.  A particularly ominous recent development is that while most of the private capital funding this area in the past has been from philanthropic organizations, venture capital has now entered the field, funding the for-profit startup Stardust, whose business model is largely based on near-term full scale deployment. The push for solar geoengineering is intertwined with the fossil-fueled boom in AI datacenters, which are part of the tech industry's techno-optimistic philosophy of breaking things and hoping that some future technology will clean up the mess. 

Raymond Thomas Pierrehumbert is a Halley Professor of Physics at the University of Oxford. Previously, he was Louis Block Professor in Geophysical Sciences at the University of Chicago. He was a lead author on the Third Assessment Report of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) and a co-author of the National Research Council report on abrupt climate change.

He received many awards and nominations: John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, Fellow of the American Geophysical Union, Chevalier de l'Ordre des Palmes Académiques (France), member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, member of the Science and Security Board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Fellow of the Royal Society, and more.