geoengineering

On January 15, 2013, I presented a webcast on Energy Central titled, “Geomagnetic Disturbances and their Impacts on Power Transformers”. You can view the presentation here. The presentation generated many questions from the audience that I did not have time to address. This blog post addresses a few of those questions. This is the fifth...[read more]

Some people are claiming that a Geomagnetic Disturbances (GMD) event can result in large scale transformer failures. Is this true? Another excellent question and answer session with Andrew Lawless on geoengineering risks.[read more]

On January 15, 2013, I presented a webcast titled, “Geomagnetic Disturbances and their Impacts on Power Transformers”. The presentation generated many questions from the audience that I did not have time to address. I especially want to respond to those questions pertaining to energy security, solar storms, geomagnetically induced currents, and energy risk.[read more]

Galyna Andrushko/Shutterstock

I recently had the great pleasure of attending this year's Breakthrough Dialogue at Cavallo Point, an event at which the Breakthrough Institute brought together kindred spirits of disparate views to hash out some of the many issues that that Institute takes an interest in. On the basis of this Economist special report I was invited to...[read more]

 Editor's note: Marc Gunther is a long-time advisory board member and contributor to TEC. Congratulations to Marc on the publication of his new book! I’m pleased to let you know that my book, Suck It Up: How capturing carbon from the air can help solve the climate crisis, is being published today as an Amazon Kindle Single. Please...[read more]

Climate change threatens an increasing list of worst-case scenarios: melting ice caps, rising sea levels, longer droughts, and more violent storms. Climate scientists have largely focused on reducing emissions to counter global warming, but a growing number view geoengineering as the Earth’s last, best line of defense.[read more]

Global Thermostat's demonstration plant The risk of disruptive climate change grows every day. John Holdren, the White House science advisor, said last year that we have three options: Mitigate, adapt, suffer. If we don’t mitigate (meaning reduce emissions), we’ll have to adapt (move to new places, develop new crops, build sea walls)....[read more]

Geoengineering — deliberate, planetary-scale efforts to counter the impact of climate change — is so controversial that a high-powered 18-member Washington task force that spent almost two years studying the idea couldn’t decide what to call it.[read more]

People seem to like to infer motives. (Perhaps it’s an inherent evolutionary trait, allowing anticipation of your prey’s or predator’s next move?) I find that a lot of people get me wrong about my position on energy and sustainability — often deliberately so, I suspect. So here’s a post to clarify my position, and allow you to let others...[read more]

Recycling has always meant reusing materials like glass or plastic, and reducing atmospheric carbon has traditionally meant cutting emissions, but what if we could combine the two to make combating climate change profitable by recycling carbon out of the atmosphere? energyNOW! correspondent Josh Zepps looked into a new technology that could pull a thousand times more carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere than trees, and could one day power our cars and trucks with green gasoline.[read more]

When most talk climate policy, they talk mitigation: decrease our ever increasing flow of carbon into the atmospheric sewer. Another piece of the puzzle is adaptation. We are way past the point where mitigation alone will do. We know we’ll feel the consequences of global warming for years, decades, and centuries to come. That’s why we...[read more]

If you think things are bad, listen to a group of climate scientists talk about geoengineering—literally hacking the planet. I had the pleasure of attending the Asimolar geoengineering conference last March and, while there, had the distinct pleasure of spending some time with Steve Schneider. Even among a group of some of the world’s...[read more]

John LathamIn 1990, a British cloud physicist named John Latham wrote a letter, [PDF, download] to the journal Nature, in which he suggested that injecting tiny droplets of water into marine clouds to increase their reflectivity might be a way “to inhibit or neutralize global warming. And then? “Nothing happened for 10 years...[read more]

Did you notice that President Obama didn’t say the words “climate change” or global warming” in his 7,000-word State of the Union speech? He described government support for clean energy as an investment that will strengthen our security, protect our planet, and create countless new jobs for our people Partly this is repackaging, and not...[read more]

Geoengineering research is emerging from the laboratory. Government-funded scientists in the UK are moving forward with a pair of small-scale, carefully-controlled experiments–one to test the qualities of particles that could be used to block the sun’s rays, and another in which droplets of water will be pumped into the air using a one-...[read more]