Month: December 2016

Grunwald, Armin (2016): Technology to Combat Climate Change: the Hermeneutic Dimension of Climate Engineering

Grunwald, Armin (2016): Technology to Combat Climate Change: the Hermeneutic Dimension of Climate Engineering; In: The hermeneutic side of responsible research and innovation. London: ISTE, Ltd.; Wiley. (chapter 8)

“The example of climate engineering, which has been an object of discussion for several years, refers to how we handle climate change and is therefore very different in character from the other fields of RRI presented in this book. Nonetheless, climate engineering exhibits similar challenges for the RRI debate because of the relevance of temporally far-reaching and thus extremely uncertain technology futures. If the debate over responsibility is conducted in a consequentialist manner with reference to the presumable consequences of climate engineering, it too is threatened by epistemological nirvana (Chapter 3). Consideration of the technology futures of climate engineering from a hermeneutic perspective leads to a corresponding result.”

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The Daily Beast: Science Can’t Save the Earth This Time

“The Norwegians coined a phrase for such projects, calling them stormannsgalskap, or “the madness of great men.” While the term was meant to be disparaging, it might very well become a badge of honor in the future. If rising carbon levels are left unchecked, the world will need pioneering innovation. It will need great individuals who are willing to defy governments and do what is necessary to make hard, bold choices.”

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Gizmodo: Geoengineering Could Be a Disaster for Astronomy

“That’s according to new models by Charlie Zender, an atmospheric physicist at the University of California, Irvine who presented the provacatively-titled research poster “Death of Darkness: Artificial Sky Brightness in the Anthropocene” at the the American Geophysical Union conference this month. In a nutshell, Zender found that injecting light-scattering particles into the stratosphere—one of the most widely-discussed strategies for rapidly cooling the planet—would have the unintended side-effect of messing with the incoming light from distant stars and planets.”

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Desch, Steven J.; et al. (2016): Arctic Ice Management

Desch, Steven J.; Smith, Nathan; Groppi, Christopher; Vargas, Perry; Jackson, Rebecca; Kalyaan, Anusha et al. (2016): Arctic Ice Management. In: Earth’s Future. DOI: 10.1002/2016EF000410.

“We show that where appropriate devices are employed, it is possible to increase ice thickness above natural levels, by about 1 m over the course of the winter. We examine the effects this has in the Arctic climate, concluding that deployment over 10% of the Arctic, especially where ice survival is marginal, could more than reverse current trends of ice loss in the Arctic, using existing industrial capacity. We propose that winter ice thickening by wind-powered pumps be considered and assessed as part of a multi-pronged strategy for restoring sea ice and arresting the strongest feedbacks in the climate system.”

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MacMartin, Douglas G.; Kravitz, Ben (2016): Dynamic climate emulators for solar geoengineering

MacMartin, Douglas G.; Kravitz, Ben (2016): Dynamic climate emulators for solar geoengineering. In: Atmos. Chem. Phys. 16 (24), S. 15789–15799. DOI: 10.5194/acp-16-15789-2016.

Climate emulators trained on existing simulations can be used to project project the climate effects that result from different possible future pathways of anthropogenic forcing, without further relying on general circulation model (GCM) simulations. We extend this idea to include different amounts of solar geoengineering in addition to different pathways of greenhouse gas concentrations, by training emulators from a multi-model ensemble of simulations from the Geoengineering Model Intercomparison Project (GeoMIP).

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Green European Journal: The Paris Climate Plan Is on Life Support: Can Negative Emissions Deliver on Global Climate Ambitions?

“What a difference a year can make. 2015 marked a point of great enthusiasm about a turnaround in global climate policy. States signed on to the Paris climate agreement. As with any complex internationally negotiated deal, reactions were mixed. But most at least thought the Paris deal indicated one thing: that countries were politically committed to act on climate change. The outcome of the US election seems to threaten this fragile consensus.”

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