Category: biosphere carbon management

biosphere carbon management, Climate science, Environmental politics

Geoengineering

Climate interventions are of two forms: those based on natural processes and those based on technology. Nature-based interventions involve the management of forests, agriculture, and wetlands. Technological solutions involve reducing global temperature through interception of solar radiation or direct removal of CO2 through chemical means or with biofuels and carbon capture. In this module we will review the risks and possible advantages of the most likely … Continue reading Geoengineering

Stephen Mulkey
Adaptation, biosphere carbon management, Climate science, Ecological change, Environmental politics

The Long Game: Facing Reality in the Environmental Century

170907084916-01-golf-wildfire-trnd-super-teaseGolfing while the mountains burn. Photo from Beacon Rock Golf Course.

Personally, I would rate the likelihood of staying under two degrees of warming as under 10 percent. – Michael Oppenheimer 2017

Do not depend on the hope of results. You may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results, but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself.  – Thomas Merton

Under a concrete sky on 5 November 2014, Michele and I awoke to realize that Paul LePage had been re-elected as governor of Maine. Once again, Mainers had split their votes three ways and LePage was elected by a minority of the voters to another four-year term. We were deeply disappointed because during his first term LePage had made clear his disdain for environmental concerns. Little did we know that the next few years would make LePage’s first term look like the good old days. Continue reading “The Long Game: Facing Reality in the Environmental Century”

Stephen Mulkey
Adaptation, biosphere carbon management, Climate science, Ecological change, Environmental politics, Sustainability science

Ecology, Loss, and Triage

Rainforest-burning-NASA-2014Amazonia burning. NASA Earth Observatory 2014

“I don’t think of all the misery, but of all the beauty that remains.”

–Anne Frank

On Sunday, 30 April 2017, the New York Times reported that global marine fisheries are being pushed to the brink. This and countless other imminent losses prompt me to once again point out that management of the global biosphere is necessary if we are to have any hope of controlling climate change and feeding ourselves. Human impacts on ecosystems are pushing the living planet into a new regime characterized by disrupted ecological relationships and accelerating extinctions on local, regional, and global scales. Ecological disruption causes ongoing positive feedbacks from widely-distributed natural sources of emissions, thus further disrupting the climate system. Globally, we are approaching a state of unmanageability on many fronts. Continue reading “Ecology, Loss, and Triage”

Stephen Mulkey
Adaptation, biosphere carbon management, Ecological change

Carbon capture and sequestration the old fashioned way

For The Natural Resources Council of Maine
HellisheidiPowerStation01The Hellisheiði Power Station in Iceland. Wikipedia

Last week the mainstream media and many of the social media outlets hailed the experiment in Iceland that has demonstrated the ability to capture CO2 from the air and turn it into rock. The Guardian proclaimed “CO2 turned into stone in Iceland in climate change breakthrough” and the journal Science headlined “Inject baby, inject!”. A similar, highly engineered coal-fired power plant operating in Canada has struggled to show cost effectiveness. Science saluted the technology in Iceland as a breakthrough that if scaled up could rapidly sequester large quantities of climate-warming CO2.

Oh, really now? Continue reading “Carbon capture and sequestration the old fashioned way”

Stephen Mulkey