The dust storm that turned Sydney red in 2009 triggered plankton blooms in the Tasman Sea, demonstrating how we might fertilise the ocean to take up more carbon dioxide.
Imagine building a dam across the Strait of Gibraltar and draining the Mediterranean in order to generate vast amounts of hydroelectricity and create fertile new lands.
No matter how much we reduce greenhouse gas emissions, it will not be enough to keep global warming below 2C. Does this mean we should give up? Not at all.
The publication of a hefty two-volume report on geoengineering by the US National Research Council represents a marked shift in the global debate over how to respond to global warming. To date, the debate…
Some people might argue that the greatest moral challenge of our time is serious enough to justify deliberately tampering with our climate to stave off the damaging effects of global warming. Geoengineering…
AUSTRALIA 2025: How will science address the challenges of the future? In collaboration with Australia’s chief scientist Ian Chubb, we’re asking how each science discipline will contribute to Australia…
This is a transcript of a speech given at the British Science Festival in Newcastle on September 12. It’s always a pleasure to speak at the British (Science) Association, but there are two special reasons…
The words “environmentalism” and “military” are not typically found in the same sentence. Yet ideas about our vulnerability to environmental change are directly linked to military plans for a third world…
This week, carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere finally crossed the 400 parts-per-million mark. The last time that happened was 3-5 million years ago during the Pliocene epoch, several million…
International climate change negotiations have not been successful. As Richard SJ Tol stated at the beginning of the 2012 Doha talks, “[h]aving flogged, ever harder for 18 years, the dead horse of legally…
The intensity and frequency of bush fires and firestorms around the globe, including recently in Australia, is a growing worry. Under conditions where mean land temperatures have increased by ~1.5 degrees…
A British Columbian fishing community has drawn almost universal condemnation after dumping 100 tonnes of iron rich dust into the ocean to stimulate a plankton bloom, in an effort to restore salmon numbers…
Marine cloud brightening: it’s a concept that has been floated in climate engineering discussions for some time. But what are the moral implications of this geoengineering technology, and how likely is…
This week’s 5.3 magnitude earthquake that struck near Moe in Victoria’s brown-coal mining region of the La Trobe Valley brings to mind the 5.6 magnitude quake of 1989 in another coal-mining heartland…
Inventors have long been protecting their ideas by filing patent applications on new technologies. But is it appropriate for researchers or companies to own the intellectual property rights to climate-altering…