David Keith > Quotes

“Once established, commercial interests in geoengineering will no doubt defend the need to keep on keeping on, using whatever means available from backroom lobbying to funding science that tilts their way.”
― David Keith, A Case for Climate Engineering

“Suppose, for example that the Alliance of Small Island States, a group that has played a vocal role in climate policy, decided to pool resources and begin work. They could choose between many credible suppliers from Hindustan Aeronautics Limited to Brazil’s Embraer. The cost of developing the capability would amount to less than 1% of their GDP over a decade.”
― David Keith, A Case for Climate Engineering

“We should avoid dominance by single government research institutions and instead build a culturally diverse set of research and management efforts, with many explicitly devoted to figuring out all the ways that geoengineering will not work.”
― David Keith, A Case for Climate Engineering

“Today global spending on clean energy technologies is almost $300 billion per year—about a hundred times the direct cost of stratospheric aerosol geoengineering.”
― David Keith, A Case for Climate Engineering

“The requisite deployment technology does not exist as ready-to-go hardware today, but it could be supplied by any number of vendors using what the aerospace industry calls commercial off-the-shelf technology. We could build the deployment hardware far more quickly than we likely could develop the rest of the science, engineering, and governance required to begin deployment of geoengineering. In this sense that one can say that the technology exists today.”
― David Keith, A Case for Climate Engineering

“Taking the estimate of one dollar per kilogram delivered to 75,000 feet and assuming one million tons of material per year, the total cost of large scale geoengineering would be about one billion dollars a year.”
― David Keith, A Case for Climate Engineering

“A stock Gulfstream G650, a top-of-the-line business jet, cruises at altitudes up to 50,000 feet. If a G650 were retrofitted with a low-bypass military engine such as the Pratt & Whitney F100, it could lift a payload of 13 tons to 60,000 feet, an altitude that would likely be adequate for the minimal deployment described in Phase 3. A fleet of just twenty aircraft acquired within a few years at a cost of $1.5 billion should enable sufficient radiative forcing to produce large-scale climatic effects that are just barely detectable.”
― David Keith, A Case for Climate Engineering

“The cost of geoengineering the entire planet for a decade could be less than the $6 billion the Italian government is spending on dikes and movable barriers to protect a single city, Venice, from climate change-related sea level rise.”
― David Keith, A Case for Climate Engineering

“NASA satellites might have discovered the effect earlier but analysts were blinded by theory; they threw away the data showing very low ozone levels in the Antarctic spring because their data analysis software assumed that the readings must be instrumental error. Beyond”
― David Keith, A Case for Climate Engineering

“Computer simulations confirm this intuition and suggest that injection in the tropics at altitudes a bit over 20 kilometers (65 thousand feet) would be adequate.”
― David Keith, A Case for Climate Engineering