Nov 21, 09
Influential U.K. Panel Outlines Possible Geo-engineering Ideas
The U.K.’s highly respected Royal Society has released a study outlining two major potential methods of cooling the earth if mankind fails to slow global warming by reducing CO2 emissions: removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and employing technologies to deflect solar radiation back into space. Stressing that emissions reductions were vital, the Royal Society nevertheless said that scientists must start investigating geo-engineering schemes to cool the planet. It said that CO2...
Science on the Risks of Climate Engineering: Optimism About a Geoengineered Easy Way Out Should Be Tempered by Examination of Currently Observed Climate Changes
As the risks of climate change and the difficulty of effectively reducing greenhouse gas emissions become increasingly obvious, potential geoengineering solutions are widely discussed. For example, in a recent report, Blackstock et al. explore the feasibility, potential impact, and dangers of shortwave climate engineering, which aims to reduce the incoming solar radiation and thereby reduce climate warming. Proposed geoengineering solutions tend to be controversial among climate scientists...
Bruce Sterling's The Caryatids: A Review
Pity those science fiction writers who adapt too slowly: many labor with tools invented for a 1950s version of the genre that no longer makes sense; they're still dreaming heroic rocketcar dreams when the future is scrambling towards carbon-free distributed car-sharing for Indian slums. Nothing decays faster than an old future, and most writers are lucky to find one unique vision of how things might be, much less find a new one when their first wears out. Bruce Sterling, though, is not most...
Save the Holocene!
The Anthropocene is a proposed new geological era, meant to signal the idea that we've changed the Earth's biosphere and climate so dramatically that we've left the Holocene, the interglacial period that began 12,000 years ago. It's a catchy (if grim) concept, but one whose utility I find myself seriously questioning. I don't doubt the magnitude of human impact on the planet. Quite the opposite. I think we consistently underestimate the degree of disruption we've already caused by altering...
Ecopunkt: Points of Environmental Vulnerability
This article was was written by Jamais Cascio in March 2006. We're republishing it here as part of our month-long editorial retrospective. The Earth's environment, particularly its climate, is not a linear, obvious-cause and immediate-effect system. This has a number of implications, but the one that troubles many of us who pay close attention is the resulting potential for "phase change" shifts in the climate system, where seemingly-small perturbations lead to a major change in how the...
Geoengineering: A Worldchanging Retrospective
Worldchanging Executive Editor Alex Steffen has become a respected voice of dissent in the global conversation about geo-engineering strategies. This fall, he re-enters the debate as part of the cast of front-line innovators featured in a new docu-style series from Discovery and Impossible Pictures. The program, called Discovery Project Earth, launches this Friday, August 22. The series will profile some pretty extraordinary experiments aimed at slowing global warming, generating...
Drastic Measures for Cooling the Planet
I believe it was in An Inconvenient Truth where I recently saw, in an effort to bring some levity to a grave situation, the facetious suggestion for solving global warming by depositing giant ice cubes in the middle of the ocean (a doubly ironic choice given that chunks of glacier falling loose from the poles are only making our problems worse). The New York Times points out today, however, that solutions on a scale nearly as large and nearly as outlandish have been proposed by scientists...
The Open Future: Ecopunkt
The Earth's environment, particularly its climate, is not a linear, obvious-cause and immediate-effect system. This has a number of implications, but the one that troubles many of us who pay close attention is the resulting potential for "phase change" shifts in the climate system, where seemingly-small perturbations lead to a major change in how the climate behaves (the classic example of this kind of change is a pile of sand with grains dropping down on the peak; some will slide down, some...
Why Geo-Engineering is a Bad Fall-Back Strategy
Geo-engineering (or terraforming the Earth) is one option we have for responding to massive environmental crises, especially climate change. If we do not respond quickly enough to the need to cut greenhouse gas emissions, it may be one of the only strategies with which we are left. That said, there is increasing consensus that it's a pretty unrealistic strategy. Given our extremely limited understanding of (and thus ability to manage) the planet now, with more modest expectations and under...
The Open Future: The Reversibility Principle
Two philosophies dominate the broad debates about the development of potentially-worldchanging technologies. The Precautionary Principle tells us that we should err on the side of caution when it comes to developments with uncertain or potentially negative repercussions, even when those developments have demonstrable benefits, too. The Proactionary Principle, conversely, tells us that we should err on the side of action in those same circumstances, unless the potential for harm can be clearly...
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