Solar radiation management (SRM) is one of the geoengineering techniques proposed as a potential means of offsetting some of the anthropogenic radiative forcing of climate as a means to reduce climate change. (Earlier post.) However, the effectiveness and associated risks of SRM are uncertain. A team of researchers from California... Read more →

A 2009 evaluation of geoengineering techniques by the Royal Society concluded that stratospheric aerosols could be highly effective and affordable, although there are questions over adverse effects. From: Geoengineering the Climate (2009) Click to enlarge. The UK’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) has awarded £1.609 million (US$2.4 million)... Read more →

In a new collaborative study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS), oceanographers and students from Canada and the United States have demonstrated that ocean iron enrichment—a proposed geo-engineering technique designed to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and curb climate change—sharply increases the chances of... Read more →

Depiction of the level of environmental impacts and the type international political issues associated with each progressive stage of Solar Radiation Management research. Click to enlarge. Arrangements for the regulation of geoengineering—activities specifically and deliberately designed to effect a change in the global climate with the aim of minimizing or... Read more →

Preliminary overall evaluation of the geoengineering techniques considered in the report. From: Geoengineering the Climate (2009) Click to enlarge. Unless emissions of carbon dioxide can be greatly reduced—i.e., unless future efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions are much more successful then they have been so far—potentially dangerous and unproven geoengineering... Read more →

Bishop and Wood with a recent version of the Carbon Explorer float. Photo: Roy Kaltschmidt, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Click to enlarge. Oceanographers Jim Bishop and Todd Wood of the US Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have measured the fate of carbon particles originating in plankton blooms in... Read more →

Schematic overview of the climate geoengineering proposals considered. From Vaughan and Lenton (2009). Click to enlarge. Researchers at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have carried out the first comprehensive assessment of the relative merits of different geoengineering schemes in terms of the climate cooling potential. Their paper appears in... Read more →

Evolution of deep convective clouds developing in the pristine (top) and polluted (bottom) atmosphere. Click to enlarge. Source: AAAS An international team of scientists, headed by Prof. Daniel Rosenfeld of the Institute of Earth Sciences at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, has concluded that air pollution can either increase or... Read more →

Earth’s ozone hole, shown in blue, could be exacerbated by some geoengineering efforts to mitigate climate change. Click to enlarge. Credit: NASA A much-discussed geoengineering approach to offset global warming by injecting sulfate particles into the stratosphere would have a drastic impact on Earth’s protective ozone layer, according to a... Read more →