Latest Planetary engineering Stories

Carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of coal, oil, and gas have been increasing over the past decades, causing the Earth to get hotter and hotter. There are concerns that a continuation of these trends could have catastrophic effects, including crop failures in the heat-stressed tropics. This has led some to explore drastic ideas for combating global warming, including the idea of trying to counteract it by reflecting sunlight away from the Earth. However, it has been suggested that...

Research on geoengineering appears to have broad public support, as a new, internationally-representative survey revealed that 72 per cent of respondents approved research into the climate-manipulating technique. The study, published today, 24 October, in IOP Publishing's journal Environmental Research Letters, is the first international survey on public perception of geoengineering and solar radiation management (SRM) and shows that these terms are becoming increasingly embedded into...

WASHINGTON, Oct. 4, 2011 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- In a prominent article today, The New York Times highlighted the work of the Bipartisan Policy Center's (BPC) Task Force on Geoengineering and their new report on federal climate remediation research: "With political action on curbing greenhouse gases stalled, a bipartisan panel of scientists, former government officials and national security experts is recommending that the government begin researching a radical fix: directly...

  Our understanding of how clouds form may need to be revised, according to new research published in the journal Nature. The study has found that one or more unidentified organic gases have a significant influence on the Earth's cloud cover. The research has implications for certain predictions about climate change because aerosol particles and the clouds they seed have a cooling effect on the Earth by reflecting radiation from the sun. Jasper Kirkby, head of the Cosmics Leaving...

Supercomputer simulations by University of Washington researchers outline the potential risks and benefits of geoengineering Scientists believe that our warming world may face catastrophic changes to its natural environment, including droughts, rising oceans and fiercer, more frequent hurricanes. Theoretically, it may be necessary to act globally to mitigate the damage. Initially, those efforts will probably take the form of limits on greenhouse gas emissions or forest preservation. But...

According to new research, whitening clouds by spraying them with seawater could do more harm than good for climate change. Whiter clouds reflect more solar energy back into space, which inevitably cools the Earth. However a study presented at the European Geosciences Union meeting found that using water droplets of the wrong size would lead to warming, not cooling. One scientist said it should be possible to make sure droplets were the correct size. John Latham of the University Corporation...

Geoengineering schemes involving ocean fertilization to affect climate have a low chance of success, according to the first summary for policymakers on the issue.Failure to tackle rising greenhouse gas emissions effectively has led to intensifying debate on geoengineering - deliberate large-scale schemes to slow the rate at which Earth is heating up. The public debate often mixes opinion with fact so scientists have now released the first summary for policymakers on ocean fertilization, one...

Could Dimming the Sun Change Teleconnections in Weather Patterns as we Know Them?Solar radiation management projects, also known as sun dimming, seek to reduce the amount of sunlight hitting the Earth to counteract the effects of climate change. Global dimming can occur as a side-effect of fossil fuels or as a result of volcanic eruptions, but the consequences of deliberate sun dimming as a geoengineering tool are unknown.A new study by Dr Peter Braesicke, from the Centre for Atmospheric...

Advocates for seeding regions of the ocean with iron to combat global warming should be interested in a new study published today in Geophysical Research Letters. A Canada-US team led by University of Victoria oceanographer Dr. Roberta Hamme describes how the 2008 eruption of the Kasatochi volcano in the Aleutian Islands spewed iron-laden ash over a large swath of the North Pacific. The result, says Hamme, was an "ocean productivity event of unprecedented magnitude""”the largest...

DALLAS, Oct. 4 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Like it or not, a climate change emergency is possible, and various approaches collectively called geoengineering could be the only affordable and fast-acting ways to avoid a catastrophe, according to an article in the fall Issues in Science and Technology. According to authors Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution and David Keith of the University of Calgary, world leaders may at some point be compelled to act to prevent further global warming....