Month: October 2014

The StarPhoenix: Soft geoengineering could mitigate change

“For those not confident in global targets to reduce C02 emissions, geoengineering – the deliberate large-scale intervention in the Earth’s natural systems to counteract climate change – offers a last-ditch solution. […] The American soil scientist Rattan Lal and others argue that restoring vegetation on degraded lands and increasing soil organic carbon (SOC) on existing farmland has the potential to sequester sufficient CO2 to substantially mitigate climate change if done on a large scale.”

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Alaska Dispatch News: Alaska scientist suggests storing carbon dioxide in polar ice to blunt warming

“In December, the University of Alaska Fairbanks geologist-volcanologist will tack a poster in a San Francisco meeting hall amid the crashing surf of a thousand conversations. To educated passersby at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union, he will explain his idea of capturing a greenhouse gas and raining it out over the coldest place on Earth.”

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Higgins, P.A.T. (2014): Climate Change Risk Management

Higgins, P.A.T. (2014): Climate Change Risk Management. American Meteorological Society (AMS). Washington, D.C. (AMS Policy Program Study.

Climate change risk management approaches generally fall into four broad categories: 1) mitigation—efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions; 2) adaptation—increasing society’s capacity to cope with changes in climate; 3) geoengineering or climate engineering—additional, deliberate manipulation of the earth system that is intended to counteract at least some of the impacts of greenhouse gas emissions; and 4) knowledge-base expansion—efforts to learn and understand more about the climate system, which can help support proactive risk management.

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Doda, Baran (2014): Why is geoengineering so tempting?

Doda, Baran (2014): Why is geoengineering so tempting? Centre for Climate Change Economics and Policy (Working Paper, 192).

“This paper studies the potential benefits from geoengineering in a standard one-sector growth model augmented with a carbon cycle and a climate system. These benefits can be interpreted as a lower bound for the direct and indirect costs which would make geoengineering less preferable to abatement.”

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