Should we encourage further research?
Why should we do more research and if so, which kind?
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“Some people are of the opinion that one gigaton of carbon is enough of an incentive that we should keep doing research about all of this and that this research should be explicitly related to the geoengineering hypothesis because we need as many people as possible trying to solve the problem of the effects of climate change. There’s another strain of scientists, shared by myself and my colleagues that says: “this is not the route to success, to a policy solution.” There is no way we are going to get closer through more small scale experiments through that route because the small scale experiments are never going to demonstrate what we would need to be able to demonstrate from the models [...] .
To sum up, I think that the controversy amongst scientists is: what does this mean for what we should do going forward? That’s where the disagreement is. [...] At a certain point, it is hard for me to sit here and make the argument that we should do less science but I know how that gets twisted and our paper got twisted by some scientists who essentially saw us as “don’t do more research” “don’t do more science.” |
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“Unfortunately, largely because of the nervousness of some organizations, research has been tremendously slowed. It is a great disappointment to me because my fundamental belief is that we have to make decisions, and for that we need to make evidences, which means doing research: modelling, experimentation in the sea and in the lab.”
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“Trying to understand whether there is a role to play for OIF, if we can reduce the excess carbon from the atmosphere, it’s tenure from a couple of 100 years to 50, by increasing productivity, for an extended period of time, and better in our estimation, for us and for our earth, I think we should pursue it. And if we don’t do the research to understand whether or not that’s an option then we can’t make that decision. So, I am in favor of research, there is a potential role for this. I think there is a lot of crisis on the horizon and we have to make hard decisions, one of them will be looking at these strategies to understand their utility.”
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“We need to understand the oceans, the largest part of the planet, the buffer of CO2. We have to collect data, understand, share an open data platform. We want to make our data publicly available and we are still negotiating with the other shareholders on how to make that.”
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“I am not completely opposed to [research]. But if it is to be done, it has to be done by responsible scientists operating in an international regulatory environment so that it can be closely monitored and so that we can be sure that the results meet high scientific standards. However, the credible research programs that have been conducted into OF have produced results that are very disappointing, so questions have to ask as to how and whether new experiments would produce different kinds of results.”
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