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
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.
Volcanic eruptions lead to global cooling – could we mimic them?
Beawiharta Beawiharta / Reuters
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.
Geoengineering the climate may be more palatable if it supports natural processes.
Tree planting image from www.shutterstock.com
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.
Replanting forests is one way to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. This is a site in China.
CIFOR/Flickr
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…
Just mimic this a few dozen times and we’ll be right. Right?
Taro Taylor/Wikimedia Commons
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…
The engineers’ realm extends far beyond construction – it bridges the gap between research and practical application.
paul bica/Flickr
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…
The future is in your hands, tread carefully.
bbcradio4
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…
Sendai, Japan after the 2011 tsunami: imagine nature’s destruction at the push of a button.
US Navy
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…
Altering the ocean or atmosphere is expensive, but not out of reach for countries or rich individuals. What if they decide to go ahead?
Martin Thum
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 effects of climate change are becoming more apparent - who will take responsibility for the delay in action?
AAP Image/Tracey Nearmy
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…
“Rogue geo-engineering” is an overstatement for what happened off British Columbia.
Kirsty Pang
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…
Brightening and increasing a cloud’s longevity would help reduce the effects of global warming.
karindalziel/Flickr
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…
Coal’s toll? A Newcastle church cupola damaged in the 1989 earthquake serves as a memorial for the 13 people killed.
Flickr/OZinOH
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…