by Tim Radford (Climate News Network) Pumping seawater onto the Antarctic landmass to form ice and stop sea levels rising stands little chance of success, scientists say. Sea level rise is likely to be a problem too big to handle. Geoengineers will not be able to...
geoengineering
Using ship wakes to fight climate change? Time to anchor climate research to common sense
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...
Climate change needs real solutions not more hot air
by Almuth Ernsting (New Internationalist) Are certain proposals to reduce carbon emissions based on technological hype? At a COP21 side event last December, proponents of Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) hosted Mike Marsh, the CEO of publicly-owned Canadian energy...
Nature spotlights deep skepticism about bioenergy with carbon capture and storage
by Steven T. Corneliussen (Physics Today) To mitigate climate change, has the planet “gambled its future on the appearance in a puff of smoke of a carbon-sucking fairy godmother”? During the Paris climate summit late last year, European policy analyst Oliver Geden’s...
Nature article confirms: IPCC assumptions about BECCS ignore environmental and wider climate impacts
In his recent article in Nature, Dr Philip Williamson highlights how the targets set out in the Paris Agreement mask an underlying assumption that they will be met through large-scale carbon dioxide removal from the atmosphere and, in particular, through Bioenergy...
Seeds of doubt over iron boost for algae
by Alex Kirby (Climate News Network) New research suggests that fertilising oceans with iron to increase the growth of algae that absorb carbon dioxide is not the hoped-for answer to reducing global warming. LONDON, 28 January, 2016 – One keenly-argued possible way of...
ETC’s Irreverent Review of 2015… and (possibly) Irrelevant Preview of 2016
Download the full review here. The Year that Ended Dangerously If El Niño weren’t enough, the extraordinary winds that struck Yemen and Mexico’s Pacific Coast were matched by record-breaking forest fires in the Indonesian archipelago, droughts, torrential rains and...
The dubious promise of bioenergy plus carbon capture
by Richard Martin (MIT Technology Review) Climate change agreements rest on negative emissions technologies that may be unachievable. While many scientists and climate change activists hailed December’s Paris agreement as a historic step forward for international...
Sign-on letter: No to 1.5°C with geoengineering!
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...
New Report: Last ditch climate option or wishful thinking? Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage
Biofuelwatch has released a new comprehensive report about Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS). Full report Executive Summary (Full references for the report) BECCS is being proposed as a way of removing billions of tonnes of carbon every year from...