Month: July 2015

Geoengineering Monitor: Blazing a trail of deception: the White Rose Project and “negative emissions” technologies

Conclusion: “The White Rose Project is a worrying case study of how international hype around BECCS and CCS is being exploited by energy companies to justify dirty developments and profit from lucrative subsidies. These developments have very little to do with achieving “negative emissions”, and everything to do with turning climate change into a deceitful business opportunity.”

Link

European Commission: Geoengineering: The Social and Ethical Issues

In this context, the main[nbsp]objective of this[nbsp]project is to develop an analytical framework that can contribute to a better understanding of the social and ethical issues raised by geoengineering technologies. It is expected that this framework can be used as the basis for further analysis with a view to developing and implementing appropriate governance mechanisms to steer both geoengineering research and deployment.

Link

Soldatenko, Sergei; Yusupov, Rafael (2015): On the Possible Use of Geophysical Cybernetics in Climate Manipulation (Geoengineering) and Weather Modification

Soldatenko, Sergei; Yusupov, Rafael (2015): On the Possible Use of Geophysical Cybernetics in Climate Manipulation (Geoengineering) and Weather Modification. In WSEAS Transactions on Environment and Development 11, pp. 116–125.

“Further, the essential features of the geophysical system as a control object are considered. The optimal control problem for the large scale atmospheric dynamics is considered and the necessary optimality conditions are derived.”

Link (pdf)

Riederer, Rachel (2015): The Climate Hackers

Riederer, Rachel (2015): The Climate Hackers. In Dissent 62 (3), pp. 18–22. DOI 10.1353/dss.2015.0064.

“The polarized debate surrounding geoengineering exemplifies the difficulties of talking about, much less solving, the problem of climate change, an issue where ethical, scientific, and political questions overlap, blend together, and sometimes obscure one another.”

Link

FCEA Blog: Discussion of Climate Engineering in Social Science Literature: Technofix, Plan B or Ultima Ratio

“This post is the distillation of one section of a more comprehensive review by the author of social science literature on climate engineering technologies. […] The aim of this paper is to discover which representations of climate engineering (CE) are considered most salient, and how they are approached. The author argues that the understanding of climate engineering as (part of) a solution to the political problem of climate change is the dominant frame in the discourse on the issue.”

Link

Inquiring Minds: Ken Caldeira – Can Geoengineering Save the Planet?

“On the show this week we talk to Ken Caldeira, a climate scientist working for the Carnegie Institution for Science, Department of Global Ecology at Stanford University. He investigates issues related to climate, carbon, and energy systems. In the interview, we focus on geoengineering—the process of making big changes to the Earth’s climatic system in an attempt to solve issues related to climate change.”

Link

Gough, Clair; Vaughan, Naomi E. (2015): Synthesising existing knowledge on the feasibility of BECCS

Gough, Clair; Vaughan, Naomi E. (2015): Synthesising existing knowledge on the feasibility of BECCS (WPD1a).

“There is a growing and significant dependence on biomass energy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) in future emission scenarios that do not exceed 2°C warming; over a hundred of the 116 scenarios associated with concentrations between 430–480 ppm CO2 depend on BECCS to deliver global net negative emissions in the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) (Fuss et al., 2014).”

Link