We received a statement from Harvard press office about Keith’s work and his response to the Guardian article and thought we should share it with you.
We have been and are currently exploring possible new strategies for interrogating the stratospheric system without affecting the background stratosphere in any quantitative way. To date, we have not written any proposal to actually do so. We want to be absolutely clear that that we have no plans to implement a geoengineering field study to release “thousands of tonnes of sun-reflecting chemical particles into the atmosphere to artificially cool the planet, using a balloon flying 80,000 feet over Fort Sumner, New Mexico.”
It is premature to consider doing any such tests at a large scale to measure the climate response. Given the environmental threats to our planet and the growing pressure to seriously consider geo-engineering, we believe that we should actively begin to study (theoretically) what we might be able to learn if such proposals were advanced and ultimately undertaken.
We do not take the issue of geoengineering lightly. The care with which we have approached our research in this area over the decades speaks for itself.
