geoengineering posts, articles, and infographics

Can Geoengineering Combat Climate Change?

October 18, 2011 by Silvio Marcacci
with 189 views

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]

The Business of Cooling The Planet

October 10, 2011 by Marc Gunther
with 282 views

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]

It’s Time For The U.S. To Study Geoengineering

October 6, 2011 by Marc Gunther
with 271 views

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]

What Is Your Energy Philosophy?

August 31, 2011 by Barry Brook
with 384 views

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]

Plastic “Trees” Convert Atmospheric CO2

August 15, 2011 by Silvio Marcacci
with 581 views

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]

All of The Above

August 8, 2011 by Gernot Wagner
with 155 views

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]

In Memoriam: Steve Schneider Takes On Skeptics

July 21, 2011 by Gernot Wagner
with 326 views

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]

Can GeoEngineering Halt Climate Change?

June 17, 2011 by Marc Gunther
with 370 views

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]

Dumping iron: probably not a cool idea

January 30, 2011 by Marc Gunther
with 854 views

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, getting real

December 1, 2010 by Marc Gunther
with 1,023 views

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]

Geoengineering: A congressman’s thumbs up

October 31, 2010 by Marc Gunther
with 954 views

Before we get to today’s topic–engineering the climate– let me call your attention to a couple of news items that got my attention last week. First, a Chinese company called the Shanghai Electric Group signed a $10-billion deal to sell 42 coal-fired thermal-generation units to an Indian conglomerate called the Reliance ADA Group, the... [read more]

Is geoengineering ready for prime time?

October 18, 2010 by Marc Gunther
with 1,694 views

2010 has been a bad year for climate, and an even worse year for climate policy. But for that very reason, it’s been a good year for geoengineering—the notion that humans can deliberately manipulate the climate and cool the earth. Official Washington is starting to take geoengineering seriously: The Government Accountability Office and a... [read more]

Solar Warming and Our Sulfur Sunshield

October 13, 2010 by Geoffrey Styles
with 1,227 views

Two unrelated stories concerning the science of climate change caught my attention yesterday. The first was the announcement of a new report on solar variability, published in Nature, which appeared to upend established thinking about the impact of solar cycles on the earth's climate. The other was a discussion on Shell's climate blog of... [read more]

Collaborating with industry on publications and climate solutions

October 6, 2010 by Simon Donner
with 418 views

The article Geoengineering: The Inescapable Truth of Getting to 350 from online hybrid magazine / academic publication The Solutions Journal appeared in my inbox today. We can argue back and forth about the societal and ecological implications of geoengineering. That's not the point of this post. What struck me as unique in this... [read more]

Bill Gates Announces Funding for Seawater-Spraying Cloud Machines

May 14, 2010 by Big Gav
with 282 views

Inhabitat has a post on yet another crackpot geoengineering scheme - people really do waste a lot of time trying to find ways to avoid harnessing renewable energy sources - Bill Gates Announces Funding for Seawater-Spraying Cloud Machines. Environmentalists have long argued about whether geoengineering (using technology to alter the... [read more]