Space And Climate Conference: Day 1
What a fascinating meeting! Daria Miyeko Marinelli (Outreach Coordinator) and Morgan Goodwin (Executive Director) traveled to Oslo for the IAC’s first Space and Climate conference. The conference is mostly focused on using satellites to monitor and predict the earth’s systems, how to distribute date more equitably and efficiently, and how to coordinate activities better.
Attendees are mostly European and American with many Canadian, Japanese, Australian and some other space-faring countries. The diversity of backgrounds is vast.
Main plenary stage for the GLOC 2023 Oslo conference. Center stage is an interesting setup!
The topic of climate intervention - of possibly impacting the climate directly with space technology is not on any of the main-stage sessions. However, one of the opening panels took questions from the audience, and the first question was: “Is observing the climate crisis from space enough or should we do more, like Space Based Solar Power and Space Based Solar Radiation management?” The panelists included Norway’s minister of Climate and Environment, the ESA director, NASA’s chief of staff, a NOAA undersecretary, and the JAXA vice president. The most specific response was to use better weather data to chart more efficient courses for ocean-going vessels.
Use Brauer, Planetary Sunshade board member and DLR Research Coordinator, gave a poster presentation on the sunshade concept which was very well attended!
We got to connect with an Italian team of researchers studying sunshade engineering who we had not met before - they are giving a talk later this week!
I was able to speak with the NOAA Under Secretary of Commerce for Oceans and Atmosphere. We acknowledged that the National Academies of Science recommends $100-$200m in funding for NOAA to model possible geongineering proposals, and acknowledged that the funding has not yet been allocated. I was able to point out the inherent value of modeling the planetary sunshade alongside other forms of climate intervention, as well as the imbalance of atmospheric scientists driving the climate modeling discussion without considering space as an option. I hopefully gave him something to think about.
A Sunshade Foundation member in Oslo (who isn’t even attending the conference!) met us for an evening walking tour of downtown Oslo! This is part of the crew in front of the Royal Palace.
This is just a little taste of Day 1! It’s amazing to be here - we’re so grateful for how our community has shown up to make this happen, and we’re glad to be growing the Sunshade effort by leaps and bounds.