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Climate emergencies do not justify engineering the climate

Current climate engineering proposals do not come close to addressing the complex and contested nature of conceivable 'climate emergencies' resulting from unabated greenhouse-gas emissions.

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Acknowledgements

The ground for this Commentary was laid during a session on 'Climate emergency: Science, framing, and politics', which was organized by J.S., F.B. and J.B.H. as part of the Climate Engineering Conference 2014 in Berlin (http://www.ce-conference.org). The authors thank all the speakers for their presentations and discussion. T.M.L. and A.L. were supported by the European Union Seventh Framework programme FP7/2007-2013 under grant agreement no. 603864 (HELIX). T.M.L. is further supported by a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award.

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J.S. initiated and structured this Commentary. All authors contributed to the content and writing.

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Correspondence to Jana Sillmann.

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Sillmann, J., Lenton, T., Levermann, A. et al. Climate emergencies do not justify engineering the climate. Nature Clim Change 5, 290–292 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate2539

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