Thread by @DKeithClimate

1/7 Geoengineering droughts?

Thread #1 debunking solar geoengineering's BS mountain

Search geoengineering & drought, you get's ~0.5 million google hits and 1,696 news articles in Nexis starting with a 1991 Newsweek article.

Must be some facts underneath?

2/7 The '91 Newsweek article reported that US National Academy has endorsed research on solar geoengineering. It mentioned drought as a climate risk and geoengineering as an uncertain and potentially risky way to ameliorate such risks. Other '90s articles have a similar take.

3/7 Yet, most recent articles with "drought & geoengineering" describe drought as a risk of geoengineering rather than climate risk that geoengineering might ameliorate.

This shift must be the result of new science. Right?

Wrong.

4/7 The only peer-reviewed study to directly examine geoengineering’s impact on drought (Katie Dagon, 2017) found that it generally reduced long duration (>10 day) drought frequency. agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.10…

5/7 Dagon's paper concludes "Using an ensemble approach, we show that in almost every region, heat waves and consecutive dry days decrease in frequency in a world with solar geoengineering relative to a doubled CO2 climate."

Did you see a lot of press about that?

6/7 Did Dagon's findings make @guardian revisit their 2014 article headlined "Geoengineering could bring severe drought to the tropics, research shows"?

Nope.

And, no, the underlying research did *not* show that.

theguardian.com/environment/20…

7/7 Now for reading this far you get a much better debunking of a very different Bullshit Mountain.

Enjoy!

4.5/7 Ooops! I am an idiot. I forgot the new paper!

Romaric Odoulami et al found that in their modelled scenario, SRM could reduce the likelihood of a Day Zero drought in Cape Town by up to 90% compared to a warming scenario:

iopscience.iop.org/article/10.108…

@threadreaderapp unroll

@katiedagon sorry! Did not realize you were on twitter should have had you on this thread.