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Articles on Geoengineering

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Trapping carbon dioxide in minerals happens naturally over thousands of years. Can humans speed it up – safely? Simon Clancy

Can we tweak marine chemistry to help stave off climate change?

Adding industrial chemicals and natural alkaline minerals could slow climate change, but like other geoengineering proposals, it comes with many complex technical and legal challenges.
From biotech to climate change, advances in technology raise significant moral questions. To engage responsibly, our next generation of scientists need training in the arts and ethics. (Shutterstock)

STEAM not STEM: Why scientists need arts training

Universities must train scientists to engage with the ethics of emerging technologies, rather than functioning as cogs in the engine of economic development. Integrating the arts into STEM can help.
The Paris Agreement could provide a forum for international cooperation on risky, planet-scale engineering to cool the Earth. Tatiana Grozetskaya/Shutterstcok.com

US exit from Paris climate accord makes discussing how and whether to engineer the planet even harder

It’s increasingly likely that at some point, the world’s nations will need to broach the fraught discussion of geoengineering. The UN climate accord was a natural forum to do it.
Will the world resort to ‘solar radiation management’ to slow the Earth’s heating? Mark Robinson/flickr

To meet the Paris climate goals, do we need to engineer the climate?

Yes, we blunt the effects of climate change by getting off fossil fuels. But countries’ most ambitious targets imply use of climate engineering schemes – and that discussion should be done in public.
Volcanoes produce large amounts of a gas that interacts with air to produce sulfate aerosols, which act as tiny mirrors in the atmosphere to reflect sunlight – and heat. NASA

Can solar geoengineering be part of responsible climate policy?

Blocking the sun by injecting tiny particles in the atmosphere – called solar geoengineering – can lower the Earth’s temperature but has some real costs. Economists run the numbers.

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