Blogs & Ecology

Lake drying up under Australian drought conditions, photo: Tim via flickr

The test will be conducted off of South Georgia Island, pictured here. Photo: NASA via Wikipedia

photo: David Sifry

For techo-fix fetishists the idea of using geo-engineering solutions to mitigate the effects of global warming sounds wonderful: Dump iron fillings into the ocean, erect giant mirrors in space, dump limestone in the ocean.

But with one of these solutions at least, seeding the ocean with iron, Australian scientists are urging caution:
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Whether you love him or dismiss him, James Lovelock may be the staunchest pessimist around for the future of humanity on a warming planet. But the iconic environmentalist and originator of the Gaia hypothesis has a couple of cautionary words about the hubris of artificially fiddling with nature:

"Before we start geoengineering we have t...

photo: Discovery Channel

Here on TreeHugger reports about different geo-engineering projects to mitigate climate change come onto our radar relatively frequently. Some of them involved doing one thing or another to the oceans to change the way in which carbon is sequestered there, while others try to do things to the atmosphere to deflect incoming solar radiation.

Discovery Project Earth Premiere: Friday, August 22nd, 9 PM ET/PT

Efforts over the past seven years have expanded the surface area of the Aral Sea by 30%. Photo by Mentat Kibernes.

photo: Getty Images

We’ve written before about attempts to monkey around with the oceans in an attempt to increase their carbon sequestration abilities, so as to mitigate the effects of climate change: seeding the oceans with iron being one of the most prominent examples. Enter another candidate for planetary engineering: adding lime (calcium hydroxide) to seawater.

Adding Lime to Seawater Increases Alkalinity, CO2 Absorption

When the man who coined the phrase "global warming" speaks up, people tend to pay attention. So it was that when Wallace Broecker, a professor at Columbia University, recently called for the use of millions of giant tree-like "scrubbers" (see here for another recent example) to fight global warming, observers didn't immediately dismiss the scheme as harebrained.

The BBC reports that Broecker, addressing a literary festival in the U.K., said that roughly 20 million scrubbers would be neede...

This sounds too good to be true: a machine that can vacuum the equivalent of a ton of atmospheric carbon dioxide a day in a cost-effective way. We've seen our fair share of CO2 "sucking" devices in the past -- everything from modified plastic membranes to industrial-scale paper mill "scrubbers" -- but they've typically tended toward the expensive or unwieldy. So how does this particular devic...

Image courtesy of NASA