Arctic Repair Conference
“With Jeff’s background in building real equipment for SpaceX, this is the first time I’ve heard the sunshade described as something that’s possible and we should really seriously consider…” - anonymous conference attendee
Jeff Overbeek, PSF’s Technical Director, gave a talk introducing the sunshade concept and our work to advance it at the Cambridge Arctic Repair Conference.
Arctic Repair felt like an early chapter from the book Ministry for the Future. Kim Stanley Robinson’s widely read novel tells the future stories of all the efforts that might happen as people start to take the climate crisis seriously. Ideas at Arctic Repair included how to refreeze sea ice, slow down glaciers, keep the North Atlantic current circulating, and more. We met people who are doing the experiments, developing the technology, and learning how to operationalize these projects. This was a conference, hosted by engineers and scientists at Cambridge, to bring forward all the ideas of how to repair the arctic. Thanks to our efforts, the sunshade is now considered an important part of that set of ideas.
Values and Politics
This was also a conference where arctic peoples were in the room, presenting, and engaged in discussions on ethics and governance. Should we thicken sea ice? Who should be consulted if there were to be arctic stratospheric aerosol experiments? What science is missing, and how do we generate knowledge?
Julius Mihkkal Eriksen Lindi, Project Coordinator with the executive office of the Saami Council spoke about the Council’s efforts to better understand the topic. The Saami Council famously halted Harvard’s SCOPEX Stratospheric Aerosol Injection experiment in 2021.
We were glad to spend time with Julius talking through the earth’s temperature equation and how we can play a constructive role in conversations to come.
A key principle emphasized by the communities present was free, prior, informed consent, shortened to FPIC for fun. ‘FPIC’ is very different from coming forward with a nearly ready project and asking if anyone has any objections. This concept is extremely relevant for local interventions like sea ice thickening, marine cloud brightening, etc. However, the inherently global sunshade can easily make this principle unworkable. (If you have ideas on how FPIC might be applied to space, one way to work on this would be the SRM governance fellowship offered by the Alliance for the Just Deliberation on Geoengineering. See if you might be a fit?)
What we learned about communicating about the sunshade
We received lots of praise for the presentation Jeff gave! “The Sunshade Foundation looks like a really polished and organized group.” The quality of questions were very high, people were really curious about ‘how’ rather than ‘if’.
Our new slides look great, and we rehearsed the presentation well. Furthermore, Jeff and Dean advanced the concept of a heliogyro architecture (more on that soon) and the intuitive and intriguing concept gave people an entry point into conversations that might not have otherwise happened.
We also have some good feedback. In the future, we’d like to include a slide that shows how the sunshade would wind-down other interventions (i.e. a future where aerosols are deployed to the stratosphere, but wound down as a sunshade grows to the necessary size for the remainder of the time it takes to bring global carbon down.). For lunar resources, we could imagine having some graphics that help people better imagine what the process might look like.
Sunshade Network:
International Team
Jeff Overbeek, Christer Perrson, Daria Marinelli, Morgan Goodwin, and Tharshan Maheswaran
We also met sunshade collaborator Tharshan Maheswaran of Stuttgart in person for the first time - we’ve collaborated in zoom discussions for years! Tharshan’s poster details his work calculating possible sunshade orbits. Specifically, he’s exploring how a Medium Earth Orbit sunshade configuration might allow for regional shading, as an early precursor to a global sunshade.
Christer Persson of the Fuglesang Space Center in Stockholm also presented a poster about how to mobilize global funding for a sunshade effort. Christer has been a collaborator with us for a couple years. We’re co-hosting an event in Stockholm on July 24th if you’d like to join.
An unexpected bonus was meeting a new sunshade collaborator, Martin Morrey. Martin is a researcher who has developed a unique sort of shading using lighter-than-air ships in the stratosphere to hold cooling material. He calls it Skyscroll, and we really enjoyed hearing the conceptual process he’s gone through. We’re inviting Martin to present his ideas to our community in October.
In conclusion, Arctic Repair was an exciting few days of far reaching discussions that helped the field of arctic researchers align around the latest findings and get exposed to new ideas. We were honored to be invited, and we contributed meaningfully to the discussion in important ways.