CO₂-removal News

San Diego Union-Tribune: Scripps scientists talk about climate change

Interview with Richard Somerville, Lisa Levin, and Margaret Leinen on climate change and CE. „Thousands of world leaders and scientists will meet in Paris next month for the United Nations conference on climate change. A key goal of the summit is to reach agreement on limiting or reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Among those attending the Paris conference will be Margaret Leinen, director of Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and Scripps scientists Richard Somerville and Lisa Levin.“

Link

Lockley, Andrew (2015): Deliberate Destruction of Planets and Biospheres

Lockley, Andrew (2015): Deliberate Destruction of Planets and Biospheres. In JBIS (Journal of the British Interplanetary Society) (68), pp.[nbsp]150–152.

„In order to study the conduct, observation, or defence associated with such attacks, a range of potentially practical weapon and defence technologies are discussed. These are: altering the radiation budget of a planet so as to substantially change its temperature; introducing invasive species to transform the biogeochemistry; and using orbital perturbations of comets and asteroids to cause collisions, or to move the planet to an unstable or uninhabitable orbit.“

Link

Hansson, Anders; et al. (2015): Climate engineering

Hansson, Anders; Rayner, Steve; Wibeck, Victoria (2015): Climate engineering. In Karin Bäckstrand, Eva Lövbrand (Eds.): Research handbook on climate governance. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing, pp.[nbsp]411–422.

„This chapter will discuss governance challenges for calimte engineering, and propose some high-level principles for the governance of the field of climate engineering. Further, the chapter outlines recurrent ways in which climate engineering has been framed in public and scientific discourse and discusses how such framings may influence the future of climate engineering.“

Link

Buckholtz, Michelle Carolina (2015): Decision analysis for climate engineering research

Buckholtz, Michelle Carolina (2015): Decision analysis for climate engineering research. University of Texas at Austin.

Masters thesis. „This report identifies the unique characteristics which make climate engineering an important tool in the portfolio of strategies for managing climate change risks. Next potential benefits and costs associated with the technology are explored. The largest ethical objections to research and use of the technology are discussed and presented in a more consistent framework than found in existing literature.“

Link

Nowack, P. J.; et al. (2015): Ozone changes under solar geoengineering. Implications for UV exposure and air quality

Nowack, P. J.; Abraham, N. L.; Braesicke, P.; Pyle, J. A. (2015): Ozone changes under solar geoengineering. Implications for UV exposure and air quality. In Atmos. Chem. Phys. Discuss. 15 (21), pp.[nbsp]31973–32004. DOI: 10.5194/acpd-15-31973-2015[nbsp]

Here, we present results of a standard SRM modelling experiment in which the incoming solar irradiance is reduced to offset the global mean warming induced by a quadrupling of atmospheric carbon dioxide. For the first time in an atmosphere–ocean coupled climate model, we include atmospheric composition feedbacks such as ozone changes under this scenario.

Link

Nye, Bill; Powell, Corey S. (2015): Unstoppable. Harnessing science to change the world

Nye, Bill; Powell, Corey S. (2015): Unstoppable. Harnessing science to change the world. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

With a chapter (pp 53-66) „In UNSTOPPABLE, Bill Nye crystallizes and expands the message for which he is best known and beloved. That message is that with a combination of optimism and scientific curiosity, all obstacles become opportunities, and the possibilities of our world become limitless. With a scientist’s thirst for knowledge and an engineer’s vision of what can be, Bill Nye sees today’s environmental issues not as insurmountable, depressing problems but as chances for our society to rise to the challenge and create a cleaner, healthier, smarter world.“

Link

Diakun, Aladdin Tingling (2015): Clearing the Air on Geoengineering and Intellectual Property Rights

Diakun, Aladdin Tingling (2015): Clearing the Air on ‚Geoengineering‘ and Intellectual Property Rights. Towards a framework approach. (Master Thesis)

To untangle the issue, this paper focuses on patents and trade secrets as the most relevant categories of intellectual property, and develops a framework within which to situate IP-related concerns, specifically as related to direct air capture, ocean iron fertilization, and stratospheric aerosol spraying. The paper shows that there is no a priori ‚yes or no‘ answer to the question of whether IPRs are desirable and appropriate for ‚geoengineering.‘ Rather, the question of whether they ought to be encouraged or discouraged is highly conditional.

Link