title: An economic evaluation of solar radiation management.
abstract: Economic evaluations of solar radiation management (SRM) usually assume that the temperature will be stabilized, with no economic impacts of climate change, but with possible side-effects. We know from experiments with climate models, however, that unlike emission control the spatial and temporal distributions of temperature, precipitation and wind conditions will change. Hence, SRM may have economic consequences under a stabilization of global mean temperature even if side-effects other than those related to the climatic responses are disregarded. This paper addresses the economic impacts of implementing two SRM technologies; stratospheric sulfur injection and marine cloud brightening. By the use of a computable general equilibrium model, we estimate the economic impacts of climatic responses based on the results from two earth system models, MPI-ESM and NorESM. We find that under a moderately increasing greenhouse-gas concentration path, RCP4.5, the economic benefits of implementing climate engineering are small, and may become negative. Global GDP increases in three of the four experiments and all experiments include regions where the benefits from climate engineering are negative.
authors.affiliation: CICERO - Center for International Climate and Environmental Research Oslo, Norway.
authors.forename: Asbjørn
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Aaheim
authors.affiliation: CICERO - Center for International Climate and Environmental Research Oslo, Norway.
authors.forename: Bård
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Romstad
authors.affiliation: CICERO - Center for International Climate and Environmental Research Oslo, Norway.
authors.forename: Taoyuan
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Wei
authors.affiliation: Department of Geosciences, University of Oslo, Norway.
authors.forename: Jón Egill
authors.initials: JE
authors.lastname: Kristjánsson
authors.affiliation: Department of Geosciences, University of Oslo, Norway.
authors.forename: Helene
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Muri
authors.affiliation: Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, Hamburg, Germany.
authors.forename: Ulrike
authors.initials: U
authors.lastname: Niemeier
authors.affiliation: Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, Hamburg, Germany.
authors.forename: Hauke
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Schmidt
keywords: Climate economics; Climate modeling; Geoengineering