Thanks for posting this! Curious about your thoughts on whether there are highly promising opportunities for mitigating higher end warming, which governments/energy researchers won’t take if they focus on lower end warming? (Maybe we don’t know because, as you say, relevant research has been neglected?)
(As you might agree, I think that’s important for concluding that there’s much low-hanging fruit here.)
I would say that there are several promising research directions when it comes to higher end warming:
Exploring in detail what the effects of higher end warming even are. E.g. what are the possible effects on crops, livestock, habitable zones for humans, but also the economy?
How could we cope with such possibly massive changes? Are there precedents in history where we had to undergo such massive changes and did it work?
Taking a deeper look into geo-engineering, especially the potentially very effective, but more out there approaches like e.g. Project Vesta
And those are just a few suggestions from the top of my head. Basically, it boils down to finding out what the effects might really be and how we could cope.
Would you have more specific hypotheses? :-) Ex: Within geoengineering, carbon capture is one possibility. Do you know of neglected areas regarding other types of geoengineering?
Or within exploring the effects of higher end warming, which crops/livestock do we need more research in? Which industries in the economy?
Unfortunately, I cannot really provide conclusive answers here, as our paper only looked into the amount of research overall, but not into specific topics. Getting an overview of this is basically a major research project itself. However, a student of mine looked into this a bit and her preliminary results seem like it is more of a general problem and not specific to certain fields of research.
Thanks for posting this! Curious about your thoughts on whether there are highly promising opportunities for mitigating higher end warming, which governments/energy researchers won’t take if they focus on lower end warming? (Maybe we don’t know because, as you say, relevant research has been neglected?)
(As you might agree, I think that’s important for concluding that there’s much low-hanging fruit here.)
Edit: Good points in the response, thanks!
I would say that there are several promising research directions when it comes to higher end warming:
Exploring in detail what the effects of higher end warming even are. E.g. what are the possible effects on crops, livestock, habitable zones for humans, but also the economy?
How could we cope with such possibly massive changes? Are there precedents in history where we had to undergo such massive changes and did it work?
Taking a deeper look into geo-engineering, especially the potentially very effective, but more out there approaches like e.g. Project Vesta
And those are just a few suggestions from the top of my head. Basically, it boils down to finding out what the effects might really be and how we could cope.
Would you have more specific hypotheses? :-) Ex: Within geoengineering, carbon capture is one possibility. Do you know of neglected areas regarding other types of geoengineering?
Or within exploring the effects of higher end warming, which crops/livestock do we need more research in? Which industries in the economy?
Thank you for any clarifications!
Unfortunately, I cannot really provide conclusive answers here, as our paper only looked into the amount of research overall, but not into specific topics. Getting an overview of this is basically a major research project itself. However, a student of mine looked into this a bit and her preliminary results seem like it is more of a general problem and not specific to certain fields of research.
It’s good to be aware of where you’re not an expert. Thank you for being honest!