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After nearly 15 inches of rain fell in one day and caused flash floods and landslides in Jakarta, the Indonesian capital, that destroyed 60,000 homes and killed at least 43 people, the Indonesian Air Force sent two planes to drop salt on approaching rain clouds to break them up before they reached the city, according to Reuters.
By Shuchi Talati
Solar geoengineering describes a set of approaches that would reflect sunlight to cool the planet. The most prevalent of these approaches entails mimicking volcanic eruptions by releasing aerosols (tiny particles) into the upper atmosphere to reduce global temperatures — a method that comes with immense uncertainty and risk. We don't yet know how it will affect regional weather patterns, and in turn its geopolitical consequences. One way we can attempt to understand potential outcomes is through models.
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By Daisy Dunne
Spraying aerosols high in the stratosphere could dampen global warming over land, but may not prevent the oceans from heating up, new research says.
By Jeff Turrentine
Science fiction doesn't always stay fictional. Space exploration, robots and self-driving cars are just a few of the modern-day wonders that once existed only as plot devices or fantastical theories. Our capacity for turning science-fictional notions into the stuff of everyday life has grown with each new generation of scientists and microchips, such that more and more ideas previously deemed too far "out there" are now actually here, or at least technologically plausible.
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By Jan Minx, Dr. Sabine Fuss and Gregory Nemet
Despite the ambitious long-term climate goals of the Paris agreement, there remains a distinct lack of success at ushering in immediate and sustained reductions in global CO2 emissions.
This cognitive dissonance has seen the topic of "negative emissions"—also known as "carbon dioxide removal"—move into the limelight in climate science and policy discussions.
By Robert McSweeney
Solar geoengineering, or "solar radiation management" (SRM), is perhaps the most controversial of the different ways of limiting human-caused climate change.
A commonly voiced objection to the technique is the risk of "termination shock"—the rapid rebounding of global temperatures if SRM is deployed and then suddenly stopped.
By Daisy Dunne
Reducing the impacts of human-caused climate change through the use of bioenergy with carbon capture and storage—better known as BECCS—could have major consequences for wildlife, forests and water resources, a new study shows.
The large-scale conversion of existing land to BECCS plantations could cause global forest cover to fall by as much as 10 percent and biodiversity "intactness" to decline by up to 7 percent, the lead author told Carbon Brief.
By Tim Radford
Geoengineering—the untested technofix that would permit the continued use of fossil fuels—could create more problems than it could solve.
By masking sunlight with injections of sulphate aerosols in the stratosphere, nations could perhaps suppress some of the devastating hurricanes and typhoons that in a rapidly warming world threaten northern hemisphere cities. But they could also scorch the Sahel region of Africa, to threaten millions of lives and livelihoods, according to new research.
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Climate Denier Lamar Smith: Geoengineering Can Curb Impacts of Climate Change
By Steve Horn
Geoengineering, hailed in some circles as a potential techno-fix to the climate change crisis, has taken a step closer to going mainstream.
The U.S. House Committee on Science, Space and Technology held a rare joint subcommittee hearing on Nov. 8, only the second ever congressional hearing of its kind on the topic (the first was held in 2009). The committee invited expert witnesses to discuss the status of geoengineering research and development. Geoengineering is a broad term encompassing sophisticated scientific techniques meant to reverse the impacts of climate change or pull greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere.
By Jane A. Flegal and Andrew Maynard
Hollywood's latest disaster flick, "Geostorm," is premised on the idea that humans have figured out how to control the earth's climate. A powerful satellite-based technology allows users to fine-tune the weather, overcoming the ravages of climate change. Everyone, everywhere can quite literally "have a nice day," until—spoiler alert!—things do not go as planned.
Admittedly, the movie is a fantasy set in a deeply unrealistic near-future. But coming on the heels of one of the most extreme hurricane seasons in recent history, it's tempting to imagine a world where we could regulate the weather.
By Tim Radford
Geoengineering, the deliberate alteration of the planet to undo its inadvertent alteration by humans over the past 200 years, is back on the scientific agenda, with a climate compromise suggested as a possible solution.
One group wants to turn down the global thermostat and reverse the global warming trend set in train by greenhouse gases released by fossil fuel combustion, by thinning the almost invisible cirrus clouds that trap radiation and keep the planet warm.