Ask Me Anything (Reddit IAmA) about my work on solar geoengineering.

I recently did a fairly popular IAmA on Reddit and found it a great way to share my research with the public that others in the department might consider trying out. Reddit is one of the largest social media companies, providing a platform for users to create communities (subreddits), share content, and to “upvote” the things they like. Reddit’s IAmA subreddit is one of its largest with over 22 million members and it hosts QnA sessions with notable people. Celebrities, authors and more invite the community to Ask Me Anything (AMA) and I recently did an AMA about my work on solar geoengineering.

Doing an AMA is pretty straightforward and doesn’t take that much time to set up. All I did was create a Reddit account, join the IAmA community, linked to a tweet proving I was who I claimed to be, and created a post explaining who I was and when I would start the AMA. For the AMA itself, I just spent a couple of hours answering the questions that came up, focusing on those that the community upvoted to the top of the list. 

I really enjoyed the experience and the post proved pretty popular, receiving over 500 comments and 880,000 views. As most of the English-speaking world is west of here, I ran my AMA in the early evening and was quite exhausted by the end, but I would absolutely recommend it to other academics in the department as a way to reach a wider community. It also provides a valuable opportunity to hear directly from the public about your area of research, and in my case, it has helped me to get a better sense of their concerns and their responses to the way I describe my work. 

I’ll end with a selection of questions I got from the AMA:

• “So, what is the most promising technique (cost, acceptance, control)?”
• “Would the reduced sunlight have an effect on photosynthesis? Like would it hurt crop yields and such?”
• “Wouldn't masking the effects of ghg buildup by reducing their thermal impact potentially enable governments and industries to further delay cutting emissions while issues like ocean acidification continue to worsen?”
• “If we raised the albedo of all man made structures (paint roads, parking lots, roofs etc white, or cover them in white sand) - would that move the needle at all?”
• “How would this affect ground-based telescope systems, either scientific or in my backyard?”
• “Have you seen snowpiercer?”

Links:

• Ask me anything, Reddit IAmA - Peter Irvine
• Dr Peter Irvine's academic profile
• Challenging Climate podcast -co-hosted by Peter Irvine