The prospect of controlling global temperatures raises serious questions of power and justice: Who gets to control the Earth’s thermostat and adjust the climate for their own interests? Who will make the decision to deploy if such drastic measures are considered...
For the past decade, a small but growing group of governments and scientists, the majority from the most powerful and most climate-polluting countries in the world, has been pushing for political consideration of geoengineering, the deliberate large-scale...
by ETC Group. A new briefing from ETC Group outlines the ethical, political and environmental arguments against solar radiation management (SRM), and explains why even SRM experiments are a bad idea. The backgrounder was released in late March 2017 after Harvard...
by Roger Boyd (Resilience) There is a genre of Hollywood “feel-good” disaster movie, where everything seems nearly hopeless until the end, and then suddenly, many times against all hope, the super-hero (or super-heroes) saves the day. Whether it be human heroes that...
by Lili Fuhr (Project Syndicate) BERLIN – Mainstream politics, by definition, is ill equipped to imagine fundamental change. But last December in Paris, 196 governments agreed on the need to limit global warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels – an objective that...
Disclaimer: This article is broadly pro-geoengineering, but alarmingly the authors say it would take 160 years of sulphate injections to keep global temperature increases to under 2 degrees! by Atmos News How much geoengineering would be necessary to hit temperature...
How likely is it that geoengineering will actually be used on a global scale? Perhaps it's more likely that hype around its effectiveness (eg "Negative Emissions", CCS and BioCCS) will just be used as a tactic to delay serious emissions cuts, plunging us further into...
by Christine Lepisto (treehugger) For those who lower their stress levels with the hope that we will be able to geo-engineer our way out of any impending global warming crises, here is another bit of sobering news. The suggestion has been made that increasing aerosol...
A recent paper in the "Science Advances" journal describes research that has been conducted into the possibility of firing lasers at clouds to change their albedo, and hence reflect more light away from the Earth. Here's an explanation of the science behind it, from...
by Greg Foyster (Eureka Street) It's a credo of consumer capitalism: never address the cause when you can create an industry treating the symptoms. This is the logic behind many profitable businesses, from cholesterol-lowering pills that compensate for poor diet and...
An article published in January by the Journal of Geophysical Research and covered briefly in Nature describes how brightening and extending the lives of ship wakes can be used to alter the albedo of the oceans, and cool global temperatures. It adds ship wakes to a...
Paris, 11 December 2015 Seemingly out of the blue (or rather, out of the black smog of the UNFCCC process), some of the largest historical culprits for climate change, countries including the United States, Canada and the European Union, have decided to back an...
by Neth Daño and Pat Mooney (Project Syndicate) OTTAWA – The United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris in December will feature all the tightly choreographed production values of a Hollywood blockbuster. The cast will be huge: presidents and prime ministers at...
A government-sponsored scientific panel called for more research on geoengineering — here’s why we shouldn’t even consider it by Shannon Hall (ScienceLine) Geoengineering — that wild and grandiose idea that suggests we could offset and even reverse the alarming...
Using technofixes to tinker with global climate systems is an excuse to avoid unpopular but necessary measures to reduce carbon emissions by Clive Hamilton (Scientific American) The geoengineering juggernaut has shifted into higher gear with the release of a...
by Rachel Smolker and Almuth Ernsting (Truthout) The US National Academy of Sciences (NAS) announced its long-awaited reports on climate geoengineering in mid-February. The reports intelligently state at the outset that geoengineering is no substitute for reducing...
by Anna North (New York Times) What is the sky worth? This sounds like a philosophical question, but it might become a more concrete one. A report released last week by the National Research Council called for research into reversing climate changethrough a process...
You can’t fix the Earth with these geoengineering proposals, but you can sure make it worse. by Raymond T. Pierrehumbert (Slate) Some years ago, in the question-and-answer session after a lecture at the American Geophysical Union, I described certain geoengineering...
Why we shouldn’t fund geoengineering experimentation, and what we still need to learn about the climate by Pat Mooney (ETC Group) The US National Academy of Sciences has released two reports on geoengineering that recommend investments in solar radiation management...
by Blaž Gasparini and Prof. Ulrike Lohmann Geoengineering research has so far been confined to modelling and laboratory studies. Serious research outside of these limits has been a taboo because of the serious risks this may pose for ecosystems and society. However,...
by Erik van Sebille and Katelijn Van Hende Some people might argue that the greatest moral challenge of our time is serious enough to justify deliberately tampering with our climate to stave off the damaging effects of global warming. Geoengineering, or “climate...
But ‘geoengineers’ say urgent nature of climate change means research must continue into controversial technology to combat rising temperatures This was originally published by the Guardian by Damian Carrington Fighting global warming by reflecting sunlight back into...
What’s missing from David Keith’s climate change charm offensive by Jim Thomas This article was originally published by the Media Co-op. Last Sunday, CBC listeners across Canada enjoyed their morning coffee and took care of a few chores around the house while the...
by Duncan E.J. Currie LL.B. (Hons) LL.M. This briefing outlines the principal decisions and resolutions of the Convention on Biological Diversity and London Convention/Protocol relating to ocean fertilization in the context of the Haida Salmon Restoration...