ars technica: Bacteria under pressure run reaction in reverse to sequester carbon
“An enzyme that normally digests formic acid will happily make it.”
Year: 2017
Li, Yongfu; et al. (2017): Effects of biochar application in forest ecosystems on soil properties and greenhouse gas emissions. A review
Li, Yongfu; Hu, Shuaidong; Chen, Junhui; Müller, Karin; Li, Yongchun; Fu, Weijun et al. (2017): Effects of biochar application in forest ecosystems on soil properties and greenhouse gas emissions. A review. In J Soils Sediments 202–203 (Part 2), p.[nbsp]183. DOI: 10.1007/s11368-017-1906-y.
“Here, we review and summarize the available literature on the effects of biochar on soil properties and GHG emissions in forest soils.”
Meritt Herald: Coral Reefs, assisted evolution and geo-engineering
“The word for this, if we are being honest, is ‘geo-engineering.’ It’s a very gentle, low-tech kind of geo-engineering, with relatively little chance of major negative side-effects if we get it wrong. We are definitely still on the learner slopes. The interventions in natural systems will get much bigger, and the penalties for mistakes much more costly, as time goes on.“
Kravitz, Ben; Robock, Alan (2017): Vetting New Models of Climate Responses to Geoengineering
Kravitz, Ben; Robock, Alan (2017): Vetting New Models of Climate Responses to Geoengineering. In Eos. DOI: 10.1029/2017EO089383.
“The Seventh Meeting of the Geoengineering Model Intercomparison Project; Newry, Maine, 26 July 2017”
Conservation news: Fighting climate change with bioenergy may do ‘more harm than good’
“A major source of energy oft-extolled as renewable is biomass from trees, which are usually harvested from managed forests either established on land that has already been deforested or planted where forests didn’t naturally grow. But a new study finds land-use like managing forests for biomass production may come at a much higher carbon cost than previously thought.”
Erb, Karl-Heinz; et al. (2017): Unexpectedly large impact of forest management and grazing on global vegetation biomass
Erb, Karl-Heinz; Kastner, Thomas; Plutzar, Christoph; Bais, Anna Liza S.; Carvalhais, Nuno; Fetzel, Tamara et al. (2017): Unexpectedly large impact of forest management and grazing on global vegetation biomass. In Nature. DOI: 10.1038/nature25138.
“Therefore, avoiding deforestation is necessary but not sufficient for mitigation of climate change. Our results imply that trade-offs exist between conserving carbon stocks on managed land and raising the contribution of biomass to raw material and energy supply for the mitigation of climate change. Efforts to raise biomass stocks are currently verifiable only in temperate forests, where their potential is limited. By contrast, large uncertainties hinder verification in the tropical forest, where the largest potential is located, pointing to challenges for the upcoming stocktaking exercises under the Paris agreement.”
Mongabay: Consensus grows: climate-smart agriculture key to Paris Agreement goals
“Attendees at the annual Global Landscape Forum conference in Bonn, Germany, this week sought approaches for implementing “climate-smart” agricultural practices to help keep global temperature from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) by 2100.”
Successful Farming: Harvest Carbon From the Air
“Soil stewards can impact a changing climate by rebuilding soil to sequester carbon from the atmosphere.”
NZZ: American researchers stick to climate protection (German)
German newspaper article on climate protection and CE as a plan B.
Emmerling, Johannes; Tavoni, Massimo (2017): Quantifying Non-cooperative Climate Engineering
Emmerling, Johannes; Tavoni, Massimo (2017): Quantifying Non-cooperative Climate Engineering. Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei (FEEM) (Working Paper, 058).
“This paper provides the first quantitative evaluation of the risks of free driving. Our results indicate that in a strategic setting there is significant over-provision (by almost an order of magnitude) of climate engineering above what is socially optimal, resulting in a sub-optimal global climate. Regions with high climate change impacts, most notably India and developing Asia, deploy climate engineering at the expenses of other regions.”