Entries tagged with: Geoengineering

25 result(s) displayed (26 - 50 of 50):

Topsight, March 9, 2009

• Geoengineering Hits the Big-Time: My guess is that 2009 will be seen as the year geoengineering hit the mainstream. Just in the last couple of weeks, we've had: A deep look at geoengineering in New Scientist, complete with...

Posted on March 9, 2009 4:41 PM

Hacking the Earth

Update for visitors from Dot.Earth: This entry is largely about the book process, and not about the content, so I'll rectify that problem. Hacking the Earth is a collection of essays written between 2005 and early 2009 on the...

Posted on February 10, 2009 12:32 PM

Plan "G"

Grist's David Roberts asked me to do an overview of my thoughts on geoengineering for Gristmill. The piece -- given the title "Plan B" -- has now been posted. Here's an excerpt: No matter what, we would have to continue...

Posted on February 9, 2009 3:34 PM

New Geoengineering Study, Part II

The article The radiative forcing potential of different climate geoengineering options is now out and available for download and discussion. As expected, it offers one of the first useful comparisons of different geoengineering techniques. (It should be noted that...

Posted on January 28, 2009 12:08 PM

Nanobama

Mike Treder, director of the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology, has offered up an entry to the "Citizen's Briefing Book" section of Obama's Change.org website. In "Advanced Nanotechnology - What, When, Why" Mike argues that an investment in the development of...

Posted on January 15, 2009 12:51 PM

Global Climate and Global Power

I was pinged recently by the UK outfit Forum for the Future, a foresight team specializing in sustainable futures. They wanted to know what I thought would be the key issues the world would be confronting in 2030. "Climate" is...

Posted on December 4, 2008 4:30 PM

Wednesday Topsight, November 12, 2008

Tick tick ticking in my head. • Nature Does Geo: Nature's blog offers a handy chart comparing the costs and uncertainties surrounding the various commonly-discussed forms of geoengineering. Clip & save! (Note: More bars="better," not necessarily "more of this.") •...

Posted on November 12, 2008 7:33 PM

Methane Trigger for Geo & Bio Engineering

Methane (CH4) is 20-25 times more powerful a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide (CO2). We're quite familiar with one source of atmospheric methane -- enteric fermentation in cattle (see my innumerable posts about cheeseburger carbon footprints). But there's another...

Posted on August 30, 2008 2:29 PM

More Geoengineering Coverage

It's fascinating to watch the evolution of the mainstream media coverage of the geoengineering concept. I'm actually pretty pleasantly surprised: most of the articles I've seen have had an overall tone of caution about the proposals, even while recognizing that...

Posted on July 16, 2008 4:50 PM

Who Decides?

Who gets to determine the "right" climate for the Earth? We may broadly agree that the current climate -- warming, with chances of apocalypse -- is decidedly not the right one. After abundant political posturing and nationalist histrionics, we'll eventually...

Posted on May 27, 2008 6:13 PM

Feedback, Tipping Points, and Hard Choices

I have one thing to say: depopulation is not a global warming strategy. Here's what leads me to that (seemingly obvious, but apparently not) observation. We know these to be true: Feedback effects ranging from methane released from melting permafrost...

Posted on April 28, 2008 6:52 PM

Notes for "Battlefield Earth"

Foreign Policy has just published a substantially updated version of my article "Terraforming War," on the potential strategic/military use of geoengineering, under the title "Battlefield Earth." As it is not FP policy to put links in articles, I thought I'd...

Posted on January 28, 2008 6:27 PM

Six Degrees

Six Degrees is the National Geographic Television program that flew me to Colorado to talk about cheeseburger footprints while wandering around a cattle ranch and a burger joint. The show now has a time and date: Sunday, February 10 at...

Posted on January 22, 2008 4:02 PM

Terraforming War

No nation that sees itself as a great power is going to be willing to risk having its climate and environment completely in the hands of another nation. Research into methodologies for geoengineering will happen simply out of self-preservation --...

Posted on December 29, 2007 4:34 PM

The Politics of Geoengineering

Geoengineering -- or, as I sometimes call it, re-terraforming the Earth -- is back in the news, with a sobering editorial in today's New York Times by Carnegie's Dr. Ken Caldeira. Caldeira's commentary arrives in the wake of news that...

Posted on October 24, 2007 10:25 PM

Solving the Climate Crisis

With Al Gore and the IPCC wining the Nobel Peace Prize yesterday, lots of people are talking about global warming. The remaining holdouts and dead-enders continue to bray about hoaxes and imaginary disputes, but by and large the dominant focus...

Posted on October 13, 2007 9:46 PM

Tuesday Topsight, May 22, 2007

Plowing through interesting links accumulated during my travel. • Lucky to be Alive: All of us are. Lucky to be alive, I mean. It turns out that, about 13,000 years ago, humankind came very close to extinction, courtesy of a...

Posted on May 22, 2007 6:33 PM

Earth Day Essay

I've gone ahead and contributed an essay to WorldChanging's "Earth Day" series, a brief set of scenarios based on the matrix shown above. It's very much a high-level view of potential Earth futures, and is meant more as a...

Posted on April 22, 2007 11:46 AM

Interview for Changesurfer Radio

Trinity College Professor of Healthy Policy James Hughes, founder of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies (of which I am a Fellow), runs a weekly Internet radio show called "Changesurfer Radio," covering a variety of topics related to building...

Posted on April 1, 2007 1:37 PM

Christian Science Monitor on the Ethics of Geoengineering

Today's Christian Science Monitor has a thoughtful article on the morality of geoengineering as an option for confronting climate disaster. It's a decent overview of the current thinking on the subject, although it doesn't mention a couple of topics I...

Posted on March 29, 2007 1:27 PM

Open Source Terraforming

Whether we like it or not, geoengineering -- a process I've taken to calling "(re)terraforming the Earth" -- is now on the table as a strategy for dealing with onrushing climate disaster. This isn't because it's a particularly good idea;...

Posted on February 15, 2007 5:27 PM

OtF Core: Geoethical Principles

(Jon Lebkowsky, over in the conversation with Bruce Sterling at the Well, reminded me of one of my favorite and most difficult posts over at WorldChanging, one that's worth bringing over here. It's an exploration of "geoethical principles" -- the...

Posted on January 6, 2007 2:43 PM

Terraforming the Earth, Now In the Spotlight

Geoengineering -- aka planetary engineering, aka (re-)terraforming the Earth -- has once again popped up into the public limelight. The latest issue of Wired has an article about Nobel-prize-winner Paul Crutzen's proposal to spray sulfur particles into the high atmosphere...

Posted on November 27, 2006 2:34 PM

RAIDs Against Global Warming

This has "duh... why did we think of this before!" written all over it: a "redundant array of inexpensive disks" to cool the Earth. Everyone with a bit of sense knows that the only way to combat global warming-induced climate...

Posted on November 3, 2006 5:14 PM

New Futurismic Column Up

My monthly column at Futurismic is now up: The Geoengineering Option. Those who are familiar with my pieces at WorldChanging on "Terraforming Earth" will find some of the content familiar, but the focus in this piece is on understanding geoengineering/terraforming...

Posted on October 1, 2006 12:44 PM

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