Showing posts with label geoengineering. Show all posts
Showing posts with label geoengineering. Show all posts

Monday, 3 June 2019

The climate renegade What happens when someone wants to go it alone on fixing the climate? Vox

 "Deep in the ocean west of British Columbia, salmon eat fish and plankton before they head inland to spawn. Well-fed enough to make it upriver, they swim back toward the coast and past the islands of Haida Gwaii, where the area’s indigenous population fishes them. 

That’s how it was for decades. But in the 2000s, fish populations were declining, and unemployment among the Haida was high. 

Enter an eccentric San Francisco-based entrepreneur named Russ George. He had spent much of his career bouncing between ambitious environmental projects: cold fusion, reforestation, and, most recently at the time, a startup called Planktos, which focused on something called “ocean restoration.”
In 2011, George told the Haida residents of the village of Old Massett that he could bring back the salmon. The plan? To drop a hundred tons of iron dust in the middle of the ocean, a few hundred nautical miles west of the islands. The method had been tried before, but George was attempting it at a larger scale."


#geoengineering   #fish  #oceans  #globalheating  #climatechange
See also

Sea levels may rise much faster than previously predicted, swamping coastal cities such as Shanghai, study finds: CNN


Wednesday, 22 May 2019

The heat is on over the climate crisis. Only radical measures will work : The Guardian

Experts agree that global heating of 4C by 2100 is a real possibility. The effects of such a rise will be extreme and require a drastic shift in the way we live


Drowned cities; stagnant seas; intolerable heatwaves; entire nations uninhabitable… and more than 11 billion humans. A four-degree-warmer world is the stuff of nightmares and yet that’s where we’re heading in just decades.


While governments mull various carbon targets aimed at keeping human-induced global heating within safe levels – including new ambitions to reach net-zero emissions by 2050 – it’s worth looking ahead pragmatically at what happens if we fail. After all, many scientists think it’s highly unlikely that we will stay below 2C (above pre-industrial levels) by the end of the century, let alone 1.5C. Most countries are not making anywhere near enough progress to meet these internationally agreed targets.

Read The Guardian Article 

See also:

A Postmortem for Survival: on science, failure and action on climate change



Tuesday, 26 February 2019

Climate Hackers - 'last ditch solutions to slow global warming': ABC



'Climate Hackers' on  ABC February 26, 2019
For years scientists have been quietly working on extreme, last ditch solutions to slow global warming - just in case governments worldwide don’t get their acts together.

Climate Hackers: The full episode 

Sunday, 17 February 2019

FUEL TO THE FIRE HOW GEOENGINEERING THREATENS TO ENTRENCH FOSSIL FUELS AND ACCELERATE THE CLIMATE CRISIS

geoengineering is a risky answer to avoiding climate catastrophe
climate action now

"Executive Summary 


The present report investigates the early, ongoing, and often surprising role of the fossil fuel industry in developing, patenting, and promoting key geoengineering technologies. 

It examines how the most heavily promoted strategies for carbon dioxide removal and solar radiation modification depend on the continued production and combustion of carbon-intensive fuels for their viability. 

It analyzes how the hypothetical promise of future geoengineering is already being used by major fossil fuel producers to justify the continued production and use of oil, gas, and coal for decades to come. 

It exposes the stark contrast between the emerging narrative that geoengineering is a morally necessary adjunct to dramatic climate action, and the commercial arguments of key proponents that geoengineering is simply a way of avoiding or reducing the need for true systemic change, even as converging science and technologies demonstrate that shift is both urgently needed and increasingly feasible. 

Finally, it highlights the growing incoherence of advocating for reliance on speculative and risky geoengineering technologies in the face of mounting evidence that addressing the climate crisis is less about technology than about political will."

Read the original CIEL document 

See also  New Report Warns Geoengineering the Climate Is a '...

New Report Warns Geoengineering the Climate Is a 'Risky Distraction': Desmog

"It's not OK to profit from the wreckage of the climate" Bill McKibbon
climate change quote
" A new report makes the case that the fossil fuel industry prefers geoengineering as an approach for addressing climate change because it allows the industry to keep arguing for continued fossil fuel use.
 
In Fuel to the Fire: How Geoengineering Threatens to Entrench Fossil Fuels and Accelerate the Climate Crisis, the Center for International Environmental Law (CEIL) warns that geoengineering, which includes technologies to remove huge amounts of carbon dioxide and to shoot particles into the atmosphere to block sunlight, potentially offers more of a problem for the climate than a solution.

Our research shows that nearly all proposed geoengineering strategies fail a fundamental test: do they reduce emissions and help end our reliance on fossil fuels?” said CIEL President Carroll Muffett, who co-authored the report with the support of the Heinrich Boell Foundation.


Read the DeSmog Clearing the PR Pollution that Clouds Climate Science article
Read time: 7 mins

Sunday, 2 December 2018

Geoengineering is a last-ditch option to stall global warming

Geoengineering is a last-ditch option to stall global warming — and it’s getting a first test


Harvard researchers want to see what adding calcium carbonate could do to the stratosphere.

"And while solar geoengineering helps address the temperature issues related to global warming, that’s hardly the only concern with climate change. As Irfan notes, geoengineering could threaten crop yields by reducing crops’ access to sunlight, and it does not address ocean acidification, a significant environmental threat associated with climate change.

But if the world continues on its current emissions path, we might have to choose, in 2030 or 2040 or 2050, between the (quite bad) option of geoengineering and the (also quite bad) option of enduring and adapting to the effects of large-scale global warming. And the Harvard experiment could help us understand which of those two bad options would be worse."

Friday, 2 November 2018

From The post-human world site: A New Life Awaits Us On The ALIEN EARTH

Read the original article and hear the podcast
Last year it finally dawned on me that we’d never solve climate change in time.

That the operative question was now: what would the world would be like after it?

Tuesday, 30 October 2018

SFTP Magazine: Geoengineering and Environmental Capitalism

Geoengineering and Environmental Capitalism


Extractive Industries in the Era of Climate Change


by Linda Schneider


Special Issue, Summer 2018
If, as history shows, fantasies of weather and climate control have chiefly served commercial and military interests, why should we expect the future to be different?”
—James Fleming, Fixing the Sky1

"After decades of lurking in the shadows of secretive military research, geoengineering has recently resurfaced in conversations about climate change and crept into the mainstream of international climate policy.2 A small group of climate scientists, elite policy advisers and industry representatives from high-polluting countries in the Global North are increasingly vocal about their support for geoengineering—large-scale technological interventions in the climate system—as a means to weaken or suppress some of the symptoms of climate change."
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"A Climate “Technofix”
Geoengineering is an attempt to solve the problem of climate changea social, political, and ecological crisisthrough large-scale technological projects. This “technofix“ mentality lends itself to a systematic disregard of risk, adverse impacts, and unintended side-effects associated with unproven technologies. Side effects are particularly threatening to strained natural ecosystems and economically or ecologically vulnerable populations."

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"The world does not need more technological quick fixes. We need a rapid phaseout of global coal, oil, and gas production and a rapid deconstruction of fossil fuel infrastructure. We need a shift to one hundred percent decentralised renewable energy production and supply from solar and wind. We have exciting, sustainable alternatives to the current status quo: a global transition towards peasant agroecology would produce significantly lower emissions than conventional industrial agriculture and simultaneously pave the way for food sovereignty.19"
  
Read full original article