Climate Reflections: The SRM360 Podcast

Africa is home to many of the world’s least developed nations and its population is rapidly growing, making it one of the most climate vulnerable regions in the world. As such, Africa has much to gain, or lose, from the potential deployment of SRM. SRM360 hosts a live panel discussion at the Degrees 2025 Global Forum in South Africa with leading African experts about the future of Africa, the climate outlook, and the potential and ...

In this episode of Climate Reflections: The SRM360 Podcast, host Dr. Pete Irvine discusses the sunlight reflection method (SRM) known as Marine Cloud Brightening (MCB), which involves spraying sea salt particles below the cloud base to brighten clouds and reflect sunlight. The episode explores two different MCB field experiments by scientists, and discusses the technical, scientific, and ethical challenges of MCB. 

Joining us to exp...

To discuss SRM news over the past month, we're joined by Chad Baum, behavioral scientist and Assistant Professor at Aarhus University in Denmark, and Julie Vinders, Lawyer and Senior Research Analyst at Trilateral Research in the UK. We'll talk through the German Environmental Agency's recent policy report on SRM, as well as the Council on Foreign Relations' Climate Realism Initiative, that considers SRM as one ...

Modern efforts to clean up air pollution started in the 1950s following the London Smog event, which killed nearly 12,000 people. Much of that pollution was caused by sulphate aerosols. The health and environmental impacts of sulphate pollution were well understood by the 2000s, but another impact was becoming increasingly clear: sulphate aerosols reflected incoming solar radiation, preventing some global warming. The realization t...

In a contentious meeting in late February, the IPCC agreed on outlines that include discussions of SRM for its 7th assessment report. For the first time in IPCC history, the US was notably absent, having been banned from participation by the Trump administration.  Meanwhile, Raymond Pierrehumbert and Michael Mann, two prominent climate scientists and critics of SRM argue that the UK government should pull the plug on their Advanced...

Cynthia Scharf has spoken with senior policy makers, UN officials, think tanks and NGOs across the world about climate change and sunlight reflection methods (SRM). Eight years ago, when she first began having these discussions, most people did not see SRM as a serious issue with implications for every country in the world. Now, they are interested. But as interest grows, the gap between the research community and policymakers&apos...

What we'll cover:

• At the end of January, the Arctic Ice Project - formerly Ice 911 - announced they were shutting down. Why? 
• A new study came out this month that draws on focus groups and a survey across 22 countries asking the public who they trust when it comes to information about carbon dioxide removal and SRM. What were the findings?
• A new literature review identifies research gaps across the field of SRM.
• Thoughts on a ...

Climate change will disrupt the geopolitical landscape. So will Sunlight Reflection Methods (SRM). But might SRM help reduce international tensions by reducing the impacts of climate change? Or will these methods cause more or worse disruptions? For this episode of Climate Reflections, host Pete Irvine speaks with geopolitical experts to explore the current geopolitical landscape and how SRM might interact with it to impact interna...

2024 was the hottest year on record. Could that change how policymakers think about SRM? How might the new administration in the US approach SRM? Do experts think countries will effectively develop international SRM regulations? We discuss a recent paper examining the topic, and find that the outlook is not optimistic. We also discuss another recent study which found that although SAI would cause some deaths, implementing SAI could...

On June 15th, 1991, the densely populated island of Luzon in the Philippines awoke to an explosion that would turn out to be the second largest volcanic eruption of the 20th century. Mount Pinatubo had erupted, releasing a huge cloud of volcanic ash, hundreds of kilometers across and 40 kilometers high. As satellites tracked the ash cloud spread around the globe several times over, atmospheric scientists noted that over the next ye...

Host Pete Irvine is joined by SRM researchers Lili Xia, Chris Lennard, and Tyler Felgenhauer for a live recording from the American Geophysical Union conference in Washington D.C. They discuss the latest SRM news including: the New York Times article on U.S. efforts to develop an early warning system to detect SRM deployment; Florida senator Ileana Garcia's bill to ban all "weather modification" activities; takeaways...

For this first News Roundup episode of Climate Reflections, we look back over the entire history of SRM and ahead to its future. For this, we are joined by 4 great guests with extensive experience working on this topic: 

• Inés Camilloni, a Professor at the Department of Atmospheric and Ocean Sciences of the University of Buenos Aires and a Vice-Chair of the Intergovernmental panel on climate change’s working group on physical sci...

In our first themed episode of the Climate Reflections podcast, we present many different viewpoints from around the world on the role and risks of sunlight reflection methods (SRM) - proposals to reflect some of the sun's light back to space in order to cool the planet. 

Climate Reflections is a production of SRM360, a non-profit knowledge hub supporting an informed, evidence-based discussion of sunlight reflection methods. Fo...

Climate Reflections: An SRM360 podcast explores the science, ethics, and our current understanding of Sunlight Reflection Methods (SRM), also known as solar radiation modification, or solar geo-engineering. SRM are a set of methods being researched to reflect some sunlight back to space in order to cool the planet. This podcast will present the views of a wide range of experts working in this field and explore what we know, what we...