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DARPA to Explore Geoengineering

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DARPA to Explore Geoengineering
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March 14, 2009 (ScienceInsider) An official advisory group to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is convening an unclassified meeting next week to discuss geoengineering, Science Insider has learned. DARPA is the latest in a number of official science funding agencies or top scientific societies that are exploring the controversial idea. But one leading advocate of the work opposes the military developing geoengineering techniques.

The 1-day meeting, to be held Wednesday at Stanford University, will be led by University of Illinois Urbana-Champlaign engineering professor Bill King under the auspices of the Defense Sciences Research Council, which advises DARPA. An agenda for the unpublicized event viewed by Science Insider listed top researchers who have studied geoengineering as speakers, including geochemist Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution for Science and astrophysicist Gregory Benford of University of California-Irvine.

More and more prominent climate and energy scientists have expressed support for studies into various geoengineering approaches, such as sequestering carbon in the ocean by growing large swaths of algae.

And in the last 6 months top institutions have launched efforts to study the subject. The U.K. Royal Society has a study due out in the summer; the U.S. National Academies is hosting a workshop in the summer as well. The semi-secret JASONS group will be discussing the topic in a session in the coming months; the British Parliament has a commission examining whether the U.K. government should fund research into the matter.

No mainstream scientists are advocating using geoengineering techniques right now, but more and more researchers feel that a worsening picture of global climate change warrants studying such interventions in case of a climate emergency in the future. "We don't want to do geoengineering but we're in increasingly dire straits," says climate expert Michael MacCracken of the Climate Institute in Washington D.C., who has ...

Original URL
http://blogs.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2009/03/exclusive-milit.html

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    • Murray Peat Murray Peat
      9 months ago


      "Unclassified... unpublicised... semi-secret..." All the makings of yet another disaster movie.... except this isn't Hollywood. This is a Defense Agency. Defense against whom?
      "We're in increasingly dire straits..." The western world might be feeling the pinch but do we want geo-engineers restructuring our planet? Will there be a worldwide vote before a decision is made? (Not just of leaders but every last farmer in the back of China and Chad too.) I hope so.
      Climate Change, Mining, Geoengineering, Planet Earth

      • Phil Duby Phil Duby
        9 months ago


        "No mainstream scientists are advocating using geoengineering techniques right now, but more and more researchers feel that a worsening picture of global climate change warrants studying such interventions in case of a climate emergency in the future"
        Still 'last resort' option(s). And no, I do not expect there will be a global vote on that scale. Anymore than there is / was about using the technologies that are currently dumping massive amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
        Geoengineering

    • Phil Duby Phil Duby
      9 months ago


      "No mainstream scientists are advocating using geoengineering techniques right now, but more and more researchers feel that a worsening picture of global climate change warrants studying such interventions in case of a climate emergency in the future"
      Still 'last resort' option(s). And no, I do not expect there will be a global vote on that scale. Anymore than there is / was about using the technologies that are currently dumping massive amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
      Climate Change

    • Murray Peat Murray Peat
      9 months ago


      Sadly.
      Climate Change
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