The Copenhagen Consensus Centre has launched the ‘Climate Change Project', which was designed to promote informed debate about innovative ways to respond to global warming, ahead of the fast approaching global negotiations in Copenhagen in December.

The organisation would release what it called "pioneering new research on climate engineering", with summaries of new research papers by climate scientists, on its website each week.

In previous weeks the centre aimed at highlighting that there were many different solutions to the issue of climate change, beyond cutting carbon. "The goal is to find the solutions that will do the most good for the climate for the least cost," said the centre.

In a paper entitled ‘an analysis of climate engineering as a response to climate change', Professor Eric Bicke and Lee Lane highlighted the cost-effectiveness of marine cloud whitening, which involves using unmanned ships to spray seawater droplets into marine clouds to make them reflect more sunlight. The research paper showed that this might be able to cancel out this century's global warming by spending no more than $9-billion in total on this technology.

On Friday, the centre released research, which emphasised the problems with drastic, short-term carbon cuts, by climate economist Dr Richard Tol, who examined the costs and benefits of cutting carbon under different scenarios.

"A well-designed, gradual policy of carbon cuts could substantially reduce emissions at low cost to society. Ill-designed policies, or policies that seek to do too much too soon can be ten to a hundred times more expensive. While the academic literature has focused on the former, policy makers have opted for the latter," said Tol.

Tol also showed that achieving the target of keeping temperature rises under 2 ºC would either be impossible or cost 12,9% of gross domestic product.

He looked at the costs and benefits of different levels of carbon taxes. "The one that avoids the most climate damage for every dollar spent, is the lowest tax examined, of $0,50. Higher carbon taxes - including those that would come the closest to keeping temperature rises under 2 ºC, achieve as little as 2c of climate damage avoided for each dollar spent."

"This is a very important contribution to the debate about policy responses to global warming, because it highlights the pitfalls of embracing drastic and immediate carbon cuts, instead of focusing on the most cost-effective solution to this problem," said Copenhagen Consensus Center director Bjorn Lomborg.

The centre launched three other papers on Friday: an analysis of cutting black carbon as a response to global warming; an analysis of forestry as a response to climate change; and an analysis of methane mitigation as a response to climate change.

All papers considered the costs of mitigation responses.

"So far, we haven't really done anything that will actually stop the escalating damage of global warming. Carbon emissions are increasing despite repeated promises to cut them. We are in danger of being the generation that did nothing meaningful at all," said Lomborg.